


apophasis

by alcibiades



Series: a little light in your black sea [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agoraphobia, Amnesia, Anxiety, Artist Steve Rogers, Beaches, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cemetery, Character Death, Depression, Dissociation, Dubious Science, Flashbacks, Gun Violence, Home Improvement, Hospitals, Hypervigilance, Injury Recovery, Karaoke, M/M, Medical Trauma, Memory Loss, Mind Control, Nightmares, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Panic Attacks, Party, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Queer Identity and Popular Culture, Real Adults With Real Complicated Relationships, Recovery, References to Illness, Sign Language, Starvation, Those Fucking Stairs, Violence against Children, Vomiting, Weddings, the profound indifference of the universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-09 16:47:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 73,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4356812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky thought he was done with being used as a weapon against his will. Turns out he was wrong about that.</p><p>He also thought he was pretty much done unpacking the emotional baggage left behind from years of trauma. Well, he was wrong about that too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. mechanism of injury

  
**apophasis** _n._ A rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up.

“When something bad happens, you don’t go around thinking about it every day of your life. You develop mechanisms to compensate for what has happened. I stuck it in a box in the attic and walled it in.”  
\-- Jackie Fuchs  


1.

He woke up curled on his side on the ground. The first thing he noticed was that he was cold -- being cold was often the first thing he noticed upon waking, no doubt a learned response from years and years on-and-off the ice.

The second thing was that he was stiff as hell, sore all over, and when he shifted it sent a line of shocking-hot fire shooting up his leg. He kept himself quiet in case anybody was watching, sat up, looked around.

The third thing was that he had no idea where he was.

He was in a small clearing in the middle of what looked to be dense forest. It was cold, but there was no snow on the ground, and he didn't feel hypothermic; all of his fingers and toes moved how he wanted them to when he flexed them, albeit that moving the toes of his right leg jostled loose another shot of pain. The sky was kind of an icy blue-white. It looked like October or November, but hell if he knew.

He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, but no shoes, no jacket. And when he looked at the jeans, they were -- baggy, with holes in the knees, but not in a good way. Not something he would have chosen for himself. He bent forward to roll up the right leg of the jeans, had to turn his face against his left arm, swear almost-silently, clench his teeth. It was pretty clear: The leg had been broken, badly, and in the intervening time period without being set, it had healed itself, but wrong.

He could break it again, but then, even if he could manage to set it properly, he'd be fucked until it healed, lost, unable to walk right.

He looked at the trees. South, he thought. South would be the best direction to move. And he needed to get moving, needed to at least find shelter, because he wasn't hypothermic yet, but he could be. He'd never lost any fingers or toes to frostbite, but that wasn't to say he couldn't, and he didn't want to start now. Not now. Not now, of all fucking times.

He scooted on his ass over to one of the trees and pulled himself up against it, grabbing for a branch and yanking it down. Leaning on it, he could sort of manage a rough, slow shuffle, and could ignore the pain as long as he didn't bump his leg particularly hard. It was bad. The leg was fucked. He couldn't remember being injured this badly in a while -- or, to be more accurate, he couldn't remember being incapacitated this badly. Even bullet wounds, provided he could stop the bleeding, weren't as bad as this. Now he was lame, like an injured racehorse, just waiting to be shot.

He tried not to think as he was walking. He tried not to think about the fact that he had no idea what had happened to him, or where he was. That wasn't an unfamiliar scenario, after all. He'd woken up plenty of times in pain, empty of knowledge and any emotion other than fear and desperation. Even the cold was working in his favor, technically. Cold, he was used to.

He had to stop eventually. There was this knowledge, this sublimated pain at the back of his mind. If he focused on it he could tell that he was dehydrated and malnourished, but then thinking about that brought with it other thoughts: If he was malnourished, how long had -- how long had he been -- to perform at a level other than acceptable functionality, how long would it have had to be? His metabolism worked at optimal levels, and that meant that he was objectively far better at self-preservation, even during starvation, than the average human being.

He'd experienced this before, of course. It was just that he was loathe to name it, because putting a name to it meant remembering the cold, bare concrete walls. It meant remembering begging, offering to do whatever they wanted, if they'd just feed him. That had been near the beginning, before he'd learned not to beg unless he was ordered to do so. But that was what this was, too. He might not be begging now, but he was -- _starving._

His heart was going so fast. He sucked in shallow breaths, resting his head against the rough bark of a pine tree.

What was the last thing he could remember?

When his heart rate had slowed again, he continued to walk. The terrain got rougher, hillier, and the going of it crawled along at an almost-glacial pace. His body felt more than half-useless. He almost wished he hadn't woken up at all. What would have happened, anyway? It wasn't cold enough for him to freeze to death. If his experiences were anything to go on, he would have gone into some kind of hibernation, a state of torpor, until he'd been found again. Maybe that would have been better.

 _Steve_ , he thought. If his and _Steve's_ experiences were anything to go on. It wasn't a good thought to have. It made him feel sick inside. Emptier than even his achingly empty stomach felt. The last thing he could remember, it was. It was Steve.

Forest gave way to a kind of desolate heath, tall rough grass, scrubby brush. Norway, maybe? Finland? Denmark? England? He didn't know. He had no idea. Still no roads. Maybe at night he'd be able to orient himself better. The constellations -- he knew those, after all. But night would be colder, too, and it would be less easy to keep watch over his surroundings. Maybe that was okay, though. He wanted to be found, right?

He got to a point where he was shaking too much to walk anymore. He'd just woken up a few hours ago, but the state he was in meant he was exhausted beyond belief. He needed to rest, if he was going to keep going, even with the resistance of his confused mind, which simultaneously believed he shouldn't need to sleep and also that it might have been better not to wake up at all.

He found a clump of bushes big enough to hide himself, not _well_ , but _acceptably._ If getting up had been hard, getting back down was arguably worse. He ended up with the hem of his t-shirt crammed into his mouth, teeth clenched around it to muffle the sounds he was involuntarily making. He wondered how much longer he could go without medical attention, before blood poisoning set in, if it hadn't already. How much marrow had already seeped into his system.

It turned out that on his side was the only way he could take enough pressure off the leg to even drift uneasily in and out of first-stage sleep. He lay there, kept his eyes closed, breathed shallowly, tried to keep it all at bay. He tried to focus on nothing, but nothing was hard to focus on. His mind wanted to catch, wanted to stick. On Steve especially.

He did fall asleep eventually, or maybe it was more that he passed out. He didn't dream. It was just -- one moment he was there, and the next he was gone, and when he woke up again, that too was strange enough to be concerned about. But what would he have dreamed about, if not Steve? If not Steve, or the past, the void must have come from this most recent hole in his memory, this current state of emptiness. It was strange, for amnesia to feel familiar.

He sat up. It was night. He felt, if possible, worse than when he had gone to sleep. He reached for the stick, managed to get himself upright again. He pissed, a short, stinging yellow stream that only made him think of how fucking thirsty he was. Maybe he should have drunk it; it was quite possibly the only fresh water he'd come across today. Or tomorrow. Or for weeks.

The stars didn't tell him anything he didn't already know. He was in the Northern Hemisphere. He was headed south. He didn't know them well enough to know what month it was, just that all the hairs on his right arm were standing up and all his joints were stiff from the cold. More sensations, just piling up on top of each other, just more for him to push away.

What had he used to think about? He knew there were so many things he used to use to occupy his mind, but he couldn't call any of them up right now. Maybe it had been -- languages, maybe he'd figured out a lot of Russian that way. Maybe it had been something else. It didn't matter. The knowledge was there but all he could bring to the forefront was the physical reality that he was suffering. It was bad. It was just like the beginning all over again.

It was doubly strange because that wasn't usually the part of his time as the soldier that he remembered. Those memories had been shunted to the bottom of the pile, shoved down hard, in favor of the ones that were easier. The ones where he knew what was expected of him. The ones where he'd learned to let go -- at least superficially -- of whatever tenuous grasp on personhood he had held onto. It had been easier just to be a weapon, a tool. You knew what to expect. He had, anyway. Or he had thought so.

Night faded into a weak, watery dawn. The rolling hills faded back to forest. He had a moment of dull panic -- was he going in circles? But no, he couldn't be going in circles. His ability to point himself in a single direction and walk that direction was trustworthy, even if he couldn't depend on much else right now. It was just another forest, impossible as it seemed that he hadn't seen any signs of humanity or civilization yet. He hadn't been walking that long. It was only that it felt like an eternity.

He liked the forest better. There was more cover, and it was easier to take a minute and lean against the trees to catch his breath. The ground was flatter. He thought, with a laugh, that it could almost be like a normal hike. If you stretched the mind. If you really stretched the imagination.

A sound caught his ear. He recognized it immediately: Helicopter blades. There was this shock of terror. He realized he was standing at the edge of a clearing more than large enough for a helicopter to land in.

He didn't wait for it to land. He started running. His leg was incandescent with pain, practically howling with it, and he thought, he really thought he might have a heart attack, it was hammering away so wildly in the cage of his chest. The helicopter got closer and closer, and then very clearly he heard the sound of it landing.

His foot caught in a hole -- a rabbit's burrow, a snake's hole, something. He took a hard fall, went down on his face, slapping both hands over his mouth to keep himself from crying out. Fat drops of water squeezed their way out of his eyes, down his cheeks. He started to get to his knees. He was shaking. Shaking so bad. Like a fucking leaf.

Someone was coming toward him, audible tread, which meant that the operative either wasn't highly-trained enough to remain undetected, or didn't care if they were heard. He got to his feet, bent over with his hands on his knees for a moment, and then he sucked in a breath to run again --

"Barnes!" called a voice. "You wanna do me a big favor and not run away? I know a lot of people who would really prefer it if you didn't disappear all over again."

Bucky stopped -- or to be more accurate, his knees almost buckled, and he had to lock them to keep from just toppling over. Nick Fury came into the forest, his hands raised in front of himself, wearing all black and a headset around his neck. "Lot of people looking for you," Fury said.

Bucky swayed. "How'd you find me?" he rasped through a dry throat and a thick tongue.

"You kidding me?" Fury asked. "Rogers has every goddamn available set of eyes on the planet looking for you right now." He eyed Bucky critically. "Not that I can say I think he'd be real pleased to find what I found. You look like shit, Sergeant."

Bucky nodded. "Where am I?" he asked.

Fury gave a short laugh, a harsh sound, like a bark. "Scotland," he said. "If you promise not to shoot me again, I can get you the hell out of here. I had about enough of that the first time."

"I don't have a gun," said Bucky.

"Well," Fury said, "that sure ain't the most comforting version of that answer I've ever heard." He came over, gave Bucky another look up and down, and then slid under Bucky's right arm and took some of Bucky's weight. "Besides, Rogers would be pissed if I came all the way out here and then just left your ass."

"He would," Bucky said, not sure if it was a statement or a question.

Fury half-dragged him to the helicopter, sat him down in it, buckled him in. For a moment he looked into Bucky's eyes -- Bucky's eye, seeing as Fury only had the one -- and then he shook his head, apparently satisfied or dissatisfied as he was going to get. "There's a bunker not far from here," he said. "At least we can get you inside and get your baseline temperature back to normal, have medical take a look at you."

"My leg's broken," Bucky said, and Fury gave him a look like he was surprised, wasn't expecting Bucky to be hurt. Of course he wasn't, though. How often did people like Bucky and Steve get hurt, really hurt? How often had Fury ever seen Bucky hurt? Bucky guessed the answer to the second one was _never._ But Fury didn't say anything else, just started up the helicopter and lifted them out of the clearing, and then back out over the heath, and the ocean, and Bucky just sat there and tried to breathe.

+++

The bunker was small, minimally staffed, just another one of the many enclaves that even what remained of S.H.I.E.L.D. still had stashed around the world. Fury winced when the doctor cut away Bucky's pants leg, and Bucky felt his stomach roll at the sight of it too. It was worse, seeing it under the harsh fluorescent lights, a lot worse. The bulge of the broken bone, the still-raw skin where it must have been poking through at first. He must have tried to set it, but badly. He didn't know.

"I'm afraid that's going to need more surgical intervention than I'm equipped to provide," said the doctor, no-nonsense, pulling down her surgical mask to talk to Fury, who stood to the side with his arms folded. "He needs a hospital. And not just for this -- he's extremely malnourished, and I have a suspicion there may be unresolved internal injuries and possible brain injury."

Bucky wanted to say _I'm right here,_ but he'd learned that it was easier just to lay there and let them talk about you. "I don't have much experience with -- serum-affected individuals," the doctor was saying, "so it's hard for me to asses the severity of his situation with regard to his healing factor. But I can tell you this: If he was anyone else, he'd probably be dead right now."

Bucky laughed, reached up and squeezed the saline bag with his right hand, trying to get more of it into him, even if the cold feeling in his veins made him slightly nauseated. The doctor did look at him then, and pried his hand off the bag, put an ice chip in his mouth instead. "Suck on that," she said, and then, "Why did you laugh?"

Bucky said around the ice chip, "If I was anybody else, I'd be dead a hundred times before now."

She shook her head. She waited for him to be done with the ice chip, and then she administered a sedative. Everything went very far away. It was okay. It felt, if not _nice_ , then better. Bucky tried to smile again, and then it was all too fuzzy for him to do much of anything.

+++

When he woke up in the hospital, his first thought was that he should be grateful. Whatever they'd knocked him out with before wheeling him into surgery, it had kept him under the entire time. Someone had told them, somehow they'd known what it would take. He was grateful for that. 

He wasn't cold. Cool, but not cold. Thirsty, like he usually was after he'd been sedated. Shaky, he sat up and reached for the container of water someone had left by his bedside.

The hospital room looked like a hospital room. He was by himself, wearing a gown, and the door was closed. Locked, maybe. He didn't know, and he didn't really feel capable of standing up and going to check. He put the water bottle back to the side and reached down to gingerly shift the hospital gown and the covers away from his leg.

It was bad. He didn't know what he was expecting. There was a bandage, and underneath the bandage a long pink cut that was stitched up with a line of neat stitches. And -- pins. Screws, just going right into his leg, attached to an external fixator, right where he imagined the bone must have shattered. He didn't think he'd ever had pins in him before. He wondered if they'd stay, or if his body would just push them out. He could _feel_ them. It wasn't quite pain, but it was an awareness that there was something there, some foreign material that didn't feel like part of him.

He made himself stop looking and put his head back on the pillow after a while. He lay there breathing heavily, and then he sat up again and pulled the hospital gown down off his shoulders, running his fingers along his torso, checking to see if he'd been cut open anywhere else.

He hadn't. He sat back again, and as he was maneuvering his way back into the gown, the door opened and a nurse came in with a clipboard. "You're awake," she said, sounding neither pleased nor displeased, but rather perfectly neutral.

He didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything. He blinked. She came over, looked at his monitor, and wrote down some numbers on his chart. "How are you feeling?" she asked him crisply.

He swallowed, tried to come up with some kind of answer. "Hungry," he said eventually.

"Okay," she said, writing on her clipboard. "We can do something about that. I'll let them know you're awake. They'll want to talk to you."

Something about her reminded him of Natasha, but realizing it didn't make him feel better. It just felt strange, having her hands on him as she checked his leg, his pupillary response, the needle in his arm. Like it should be familiar, but it wasn't at all.

She left again, and he reached for the water and gulped some more of it down. He wondered who _they_ were, but wondering was pretty stupid when he'd find out soon enough. Fury, probably, and -- who else? She would have said Steve, if it was Steve, wouldn't she? And if it _wasn't_ Steve, then where was Steve?

That was -- that was a bad path to let himself follow. It didn't lead anywhere good, he should have learned that by now, but as usual, he was slow as hell to catch on when it really mattered. Steve was fine, he had to be, they would have. Someone would have said something, if Steve wasn't fine. Fury had said -- he'd _said_ Steve had everybody looking for Bucky. Steve, present tense. Not past tense.

The door opened again and Fury came in with a young woman Bucky recognized as Sharon Carter. He'd seen her around a bit, but he didn't know if they'd ever really spoken. Not for the first time, he thought that she didn't really look like Peggy, not objectively, but there was that duty-driven, determined set to her face, with just enough spark in her eyes to let you know she could be a real firebrand when it came down to it. That was the resemblance, right there.

Nobody said anything for a minute, so eventually Bucky said, "She -- the nurse, she said you wanted to talk to me."

"Well, s'pose we do," Fury said. "Originally my first question was going to be along the lines of 'what the hell have you been up to for the past five months,' but considering when I found you your first question was how did I find you and the second was where am I, I kind of get the feeling you might not know."

Bucky stared at him. He shook his head.

Carter folded her arms, and she and Fury stood next to each other like that, same posture and everything. "What do you remember?" she asked.

The door did lock, Bucky thought. It locked from the outside. They hadn't cuffed him to the bed, but that was probably out of some misplaced sense of politeness. They were worried. Whatever had been going on for the past -- _five months_ , Fury had said -- hadn't been good, and now -- "Nothing," Bucky said. "I don't remember anything."

"So you just woke up in a forest in Scotland with a broken leg and no idea how you got there," Fury said.

"Pretty much," Bucky agreed.

"Do you remember Slovenia?" Carter asked, and Bucky gave her a blank look. "No? How about Paris? Gothenburg?"

"I said I don't remember," Bucky said, shaking his head, and then regretting it when it felt like his entire brain had rattled. "Where's Steve?"

"Where Captain Rogers is or isn't is completely irrelevant to the situation at hand," Carter said. "I'm sure he's on his way. You're sure you don't remember _anything_? Nothing at all?"

"Nothing," Bucky said. "Like -- a black hole, nothing."

"That's awfully convenient," Fury said. "For you. Not for the rest of us."

Carter made a sort of 'tsk' sound to herself and unfolded her arms. "Steve," said Bucky. "Steve's on his way?"

He didn't get an answer, just a sharp look from each of them. "We'll have to look at the brain scans again," Carter said. "Look for patterns like we saw in Delhi. I don't know if we're going to find much, though. Whatever it was, it seems like it's gone."

"Yeah, gone for now," Fury said. "But who knows when it'll be back." Bucky just stared at them, wishing that the words made him feel anything at all. Should have made him feel nervous, sick, but they could have been talking about slicing him open and sticking hot needles in his brain and he probably would have just sat there paralyzed. He had no idea. No context for what it was they were talking about.

He ignored them, and eventually they stopped asking him questions and just left. The nurse came back with food and made him eat it slowly; he had to struggle not to cry in front of her, how good it felt to be eating real food, even if it was hospital food. The way his brain worked, it would have been funny, in any other situation. It almost was, even now.

He didn't eat a lot - there wasn't a lot for him to eat. She wouldn't let him. But he ate enough that he didn't feel gnawingly hungry anymore, and that feeling of satiety, even as negligible as it was, was enough to lull him into sleep. He thought as he drifted off that he might still be drugged; he didn't feel any real pain, and it would have been a smart move, if they were uncertain of his motives, to keep him moderately tranquilized.

He woke up again to muffled voices, and his heart twanged painfully with recognition at the sound of Steve talking. He was too muzzy to make out what Steve was saying, exactly, but the tone was very familiar. Steve's argumentative tone, clear and righteous, rising in volume as they got closer. He sat up, reaching for his hair, realizing he hadn't even seen himself in a mirror since he'd gotten back, had no idea what he looked like right now, other than _bad._

The door banged open, and Bucky could have cried then too, seeing Steve, as tall and as big as he could make himself, his expression indignant. The nurse was behind him, trying to tell him he wasn't supposed to go in there without permission, but Steve was ignoring her. His eyes were fixed on Bucky.

"Bucky," he said, and he sounded -- scared. All the fight gone out of him. Like he was afraid Bucky might _not_ recognize him, all over again.

Bucky tried to smile, but he had a feeling that the expression his face made wasn't quite the one he was going for. Steve came over very rapidly and touched his cheek, his hair, with visible, barely-restrained hysteria, and looked at his leg for a long moment. "Are you hurt anywhere else?" he asked.

"I don't know," Bucky said, and then, "I don't think so."

"That's good," Steve said. He swallowed thickly.

"Do you," said Bucky. "When I -- was I wearing my wedding ring?"

Steve exhaled. His eyes had gotten shiny, full of tears, but he was smiling. He reached under his t-shirt, where there was a little lump that rested right over his heart, and pulled out a chain. Both of their rings were dangling off it, clinking together, silver and gold. "No," he said. "You weren't wearing it when it happened. I have it. It's okay. Do you want it now?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Please."

Steve grabbed a chair and pulled it up next to the bed. He ducked his head to pull the necklace off, and his hands were shaking so badly he almost couldn't get the clasp undone. He started to put the ring into Bucky's palm when he'd finally gotten it, but Bucky turned his hand over and offered it to Steve instead.

Steve put the ring on his finger -- the right hand. It wasn't the correct finger, technically, but wearing metal against metal just felt stupid and neither one of them were particular sticklers for tradition. Bucky flexed his hand, brought it back over and looked at the ring, its familiar scuffs. "I don't remember anything that happened," he said eventually. "I don't remember anything, and nobody wants to tell me." He looked up at Steve, met Steve's eyes. "All I know is I woke up in the middle of nowhere starved half to death with a fucked-up leg, wearing clothes that weren't mine, and I can't remember a fucking thing."

"They told me you couldn't remember," Steve said. "Sharon and Fury did, I mean. I was -- I was worried. I didn't know how much they meant. I didn't know if --"

He didn't know if Bucky had forgotten him again. Bucky reached over and stroked his hand through Steve's hair, and Steve leaned forward to rest his forehead against Bucky's shoulder. They stayed like that for a while, and then Steve sat up and wiped his eyes, laughing a little, quietly.

He put the chain back around his neck and tucked it into his shirt again. He met Bucky's eyes and held his gaze, looking for all the world like he was searching for something important, and then he leaned back in the chair. "I don't know how much I can help," he said. "I don't know where you were for all of it, or what you were doing. But I can tell you some of it. I _will_ tell you what I know."

Bucky managed a ghost of a smile for him, and Steve smiled back. "Okay, then," Steve said. He reached out and touched the ring on Bucky's finger, twisted it slightly. "What's the last thing you _do_ remember?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for joining me for this installment of Bucky Barnes Suffering Theatre! Sorry. As usual, if there's anything I have failed to tag for that you'd like to see in the tags, please don't hesitate to let me know. 
> 
> Next chapter will be up soon! In the meantime, come say hi to me on [tumblr!](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/)


	2. breaking glass and throwing rice

2.

They'd gotten married at City Hall, on a beautiful fall day, all the leaves starting to change and the sky a clear, flawless blue. A postcard kind of day, Bucky thought, the best kind of weather you could ask for.

Pepper, Sam, and Natasha were there. They'd wanted Peggy to be there too, but she wasn't well enough to be up and about, so instead they'd gone to see her the day they got their marriage license, to get her blessing of sorts. "I think I'm a bit jealous," she'd said to them, smiling. "But I certainly can't have him anymore, and you deserve him. You loved him first, after all."

It made Steve a little bit melancholy, Bucky could tell, but it was a fleeting thing that didn't last in the face of his happiness, blowing away like a wisp of cloud on the wind. And Bucky was happy too, albeit in a surreal way, like he still couldn't quite believe it was really happening. He didn't believe it was happening until he was standing there, staring Steve in the face.

He'd told Pepper first. He didn't know exactly what strings she'd had to pull, but the fact of the matter was that they didn't want a lot of people there. It wasn't that Bucky was ashamed of Steve -- far from it -- but they lead their lives in the public eye, underneath the scrutinizing lenses of the paparazzi and gossip columnists, and Bucky didn't want any of this to belong to the vultures. This was his and Steve's, and not a scrap of it anyone else's. So they had engineered it all pretty carefully. They showed up at the building separately, took side entrances, completely unannounced and unharassed.

Even City Hall itself seemed emptier than it ought to be, a feeling which only added to the surreal nature of the whole event, like Bucky was walking down these corridors in a dream. But he knew he wasn't, when he saw Steve: Nobody could dream up the expression on Steve's face. He was very serious in his blue suit, his gaze turned inward, and then when he spotted Bucky coming down the hall, it changed to some amalgam of nervousness, pride, and delight that was at once profoundly childlike in its purity and somehow much deeper, much more mature.

Their vows were short. Bucky felt like -- Steve already _knew_ , and they'd told each other more than once. And more than that, they'd both _shown_ each other, over and over, that they were in it till the last breath, past it if there was such a thing. And so Sam came up and handed them each their rings, smiling, looking maybe a little teary, and Bucky said, "Here goes nothing, huh?" and slipped Steve's wedding ring onto his finger. The ring was simple, just a gold band that caught all the warmth of Steve's skin, and they both just stared at Steve's hand for a second, before Steve snapped out of his reverie and put Bucky's ring on his finger too.

Pepper was wiping her eyes, Sam was smiling so hard Bucky thought his face might break, and even Natasha looked just about as sentimental as she ever got. Bucky didn't feel like crying at all. Just like he was a balloon, ready to either burst, or float away above it all. Like he was weightless with joy.

Natasha took a few photos of Steve and Bucky, and they got a few shots of them all together, standing out under the yellow leaves. Later, when he looked at them, Bucky couldn't believe how _good_ they looked together, Steve in his blue suit, his gold hair shining in the sunlight, Bucky next to him in the pale grey Tom Ford that Steve liked so much on him. When you looked at those photos, there was no sign of the marks their past had left on either of them. No evidence at all.

After that, they went to dinner at probably the fanciest restaurant Bucky had ever seen, which was saying something. They ate seven courses, which astonished even Bucky, all of which were delicious, and it was just -- the service was perfect, the view was perfect, the big windows opening onto Central Park, the crisp white linens. And for once in his life he felt like maybe he _deserved_ it, even if he could never have dreamed it as a kid, or even as a young man. 

He thought the night might be over after that, and that would have been fine. It had been so lovely. It had been so -- sublime. But instead, Natasha got this sly look on her face and said, "Let's do karaoke," and everyone was in such a good mood that they just agreed to it, right away, even Steve and Pepper. They all piled into a cab and went uptown to some surprisingly classy bar with a bunch of private karaoke rooms, where the owner seemed to know Natasha, though Bucky couldn't tell if he was excited to see her, or scared.

They ordered a bottle of champagne and looked through the song list. Sam went first, and then when he was finished he got a funny look on his face and raised his glass. "I just have to say," he said, "I've seen a lot of shit -- I think we've all seen a lot of shit. But everything that happened with the two of you, what you guys have -- that really gives me hope. It makes me feel good, because you two are two of the best guys I know, and it makes me happy that you're getting what you deserve. I would say 'the happy ending you deserve,' but this sure as hell ain't no ending, this is a beginning. Cheers."

"Cheers," said Bucky, and beside him, Steve lifted his glass too, and then pulled Sam into a hug when he leaned in to clink their glasses together. Champagne sloshed onto the table, but nobody really seemed to care.

"I wish I had some glass to break," Natasha said wryly. "But I think they frown upon that in bars. And since Wilson here just said everything I wanted to say probably better than I could --" she lifted her glass too. "За новобрачных!"

They all clinked their glasses together again and Natasha squeezed around the table and into Bucky's arms, burying her face against his chest and holding him tight, and then Steve joined in on it too, and Pepper and Sam, so they were all hugging each other, all of their arms intertwined in such a way that for a second Bucky genuinely couldn't tell where any of them began or ended.

The bottle of champagne went away very quickly, and then they all ordered another round of drinks as Natasha was standing on the table performing an impassioned rendition of "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'." And then that round of drinks was gone too, and another, and the last song of the night ended up being Bucky doing "Roxanne" while Natasha, Sam, and Steve all performed backup for him and Pepper giggled helplessly and tried to hold her phone steady to film it.

After that, Pepper, Sam, and Natasha called it a night, and Bucky couldn't blame them. It was getting on almost two in the morning, and they'd all had wine with dinner and then several rounds at the karaoke bar. Even Bucky had some kind of buzz going on, although he had a feeling it had more to do with endorphins and possibly oxytocin than it did with alcohol.

"Are you sure you don't want me to get a car for you?" Pepper asked, her hands on Bucky's face, as her ride was pulling up at the curb.

Bucky put his hands on top of hers, glanced at Steve. "No," he said. "Thank you, sweetheart, but I think we're going to walk for a while." He took her left hand and kissed her knuckles. "Thank you for coming, Pep. It really means the world to me and Steve."

"Oh -- stop," Pepper said, wiping her eyes with her other hand. "It means the world to me that you wanted to have me here. I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to say anything before, but I'm just -- I'm so happy for you, James. For you and Steve. Like Sam said, you really deserve this happiness."

Bucky smiled at her, and she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him fiercely for a moment, and then got into the back of the car. "Goodnight!" she called through the open window, as it pulled away from the curb. "Congratulations!"

"How did we get so lucky," Bucky said absently. "To have these friends?"

Steve laughed, shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I think that to myself a lot." His expression turned fond. "Especially you."

"Are you still allowed to say that?" Bucky asked, putting his hands in his pockets and starting down the street at a sedate pace. "Am I still allowed to be your friend, now that I'm -- christ." He laughed. "Your husband."

"I think so," Steve said. "I mean -- you are. You're my best friend, Buck. You have been for a really long time."

"Yeah," Bucky agreed. "Me too." They walked together in the cool night, their shoulders occasionally bumping together, under the blue velvet sky and all the millions of city lights, the clamor of taxis and the noise of people talking and laughing every bar they passed by.

"You happy?" he asked Steve eventually, and Steve just turned to look at him, reached over to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear, and said, "The happiest."

They weren't far from the tower when they passed by a particularly loud club. The bass was thumping out into the street, and Bucky turned and glanced at Steve, still floating on his cloud of excitement and satisfaction. Steve slowed down, sensing that it had caught Bucky's attention, and raised his eyebrow. "You want to?" Bucky asked, inclining his head. "You want to go dancing with me?"

Steve gave the club a slightly wary look just for a moment, and then shrugged, surprising Bucky a little. "Sure," he said. "Why not?"

It was hot inside, muggy with all those people moving around. Bucky took his and Steve's jackets, shoving his tie into the inner pocket and unbuttoning the top two buttons of his shirt, and put them in the coat check. The place was so dim you could hardly see anybody anyway, so there was no fear of the two of them being recognized. The low buzz of the bass was so insistent he could feel it in his chest.

He took Steve by the hand and the two of them waded out into the sea of bodies. It was at once tremendously familiar and totally different from the way dancehalls had been back in the day -- there was that same certain sense of forced intimacy, a sort of desperate closeness that could forge connections in an instant, even if the mechanics were different. But wasn't that the way it all was? The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

Steve's face looked alien, lit up faintly by the cold blue of the blacklights and the reds of the neon. Alien, and just as beautiful as he always was, and maybe a little lost. Bucky leaned in, put one of his hands on Steve's face to kiss him, slow and deep. He hooked the fingers of his other hand into Steve's beltloops, and rolled his hips forward against Steve's.

Steve melted into it, not just the kiss, but the whole thing. He let go, let himself move, feel the music in a way he probably would have denied ever being capable of. But here and now, he was. Maybe it was just that he was too happy to worry about anything else, maybe it was letting Bucky lead him - it didn't matter. Here they were, just two bodies amid all the others, and for once, being different meant nothing at all.

They danced and danced, song after song, until they were both sweaty. Steve's hands slid through Bucky's hair, his mouth seeking Bucky's for kisses, until they were both so het up that they stumbled out the back entrance of the club into an alley and fucked frantically right there. Afterwards they broke apart breathless, exhilarated, and laughing, and it wasn't until they'd rapidly put themselves back together and gotten a block and a half away that Bucky realized they'd forgotten their jackets and had to go back for them.

He guessed from the look on the coat check attendant's face that it was pretty obvious what he'd been doing; his hair was a tangled mess and his mouth felt swollen. He tipped her generously, shrugged his jacket back on, and took Steve's out to him where he was waiting, standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.

"It's almost four in the morning," Steve said. Steve looked just as wrecked as Bucky supposed he himself did, his hair all sticking up in different directions and his shirt nearly transparent where he'd sweated through it. "We stayed out basically all night."

"Just like the old days," Bucky said.

"Sure," Steve said, " _your_ old days. Come on, I want to walk the rest of the way back."

Bucky was, perversely, still not tired when they got home, and instead of heading to bed, he and Steve went up to the rooftop and sat there passing a glass of very old wine back and forth and watching the sun rise. You could see everything from here, Bucky thought, looking at Steve. You could see everything.

+++

About a month later, Bucky was at a budget meeting with Pepper and what seemed to be about half the company. They were deep in the middle of a discussion of insurance premiums when the door opened and Nicole came in, making a beeline straight for Bucky, whose immediate thought was _uh-oh._

"Excuse me for interrupting," she said, and then leaned down to quietly say in Bucky's ear, "Captain Rogers is outside. He said he needed to speak to you, urgently."

"Thank you," Bucky said. "Excuse me, everyone." He glanced over his shoulder where he could see Steve, through the frosted glass windows of the conference room, standing and waiting.

He jogged out, and Steve turned toward him. He was wearing his uniform, which -- "What's up?" Bucky said. "Mission? You gotta go?"

"Yeah, it's a mission," Steve said. "They're meeting upstairs right now. But, uh -- they wanted me to bring you too."

Bucky blinked. "All right," he said. "Okay. Just give me thirty seconds." He turned and went back into the conference room, closing his folder of papers, picking it up and grabbing his tablet. "I'm sorry, I've gotta go," he said. "Pepper, I'll email you."

He headed back outside, tucking his folder under his arm. "You giving me the rundown while we go up?" he asked Steve. "The fact that you're in the uniform tells me either we're moving on this right now, or you're just really eager to wear that thing."

"Not the second one," Steve said. "At least this version doesn't ride up as much as the first one Coulson made." He took Bucky's tablet, messed with it for a moment, and then passed it to Bucky again as they waited for the elevator to come down. "I don't know a lot about what's happening. There was some kind of large object impact, somewhere in Idaho, and it's giving off a strange energy signature that Tony thinks is worth investigating."

"Idaho," Bucky said. "I've always wanted to go to Idaho." He looked at the news article on the screen, scrolling through it as the elevator took them up.

Everyone was waiting there -- Tony, Natasha, Bruce, Clint; hell, even Thor was there. All of them in their uniforms. "Hey, it's Business Barnes!" said Tony, and then, when Bucky gave him a look, "You're a man of many hats. I was just wondering which particular version we were going to get today."

Thor came over too and clapped Steve -- and then Bucky -- on the shoulder, harder than Bucky personally felt was necessary. "Captain Rogers!" he said. "Sergeant Barnes! A pleasure to see you both, truly, though I wish it was under merrier circumstances."

"Right," Bucky said. "Agreed. And speaking of those circumstances, what's going on? The article is pretty vague."

"Well, they don't have the benefit of my technology and expertise," Tony said, pulling up a big screen full of information. "So of course it is. Uh -- Banner, you're the one who found it, you tell them."

"About twelve hours ago," Banner said, shifting into position beside Tony, "what was at first assumed to be a small meteorite made ground contact outside of Cottonwood, Idaho. There was a fairly substantial explosion, but no injuries or casualties. A farmer reported it to his local news station, and we got wind of it through multiple sources -- NASA, news channels, law enforcement."

"Right," Tony said. "But things come flying out of the sky and may or may not explode in a cornfield or on somebody's house on a pretty regular basis. What's weird --"

"What's weird," Banner said, pulling up a spectrometer reading, "is this. Not only is this very clearly not an object of terrestrial origin, most of its elements don't even come from our _galaxy_ , and the only time I've seen something even remotely similar --" he moved a second reading next to the first one and blew them both up about double size, "is right here."

"That's a reading from the Tesseract," Natasha said quietly. Bucky felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and everyone in the room was very silent for a moment.

"So it's Asgardian?" Steve asked.

"I do not believe it is of my world," Thor said. "Since my brother's attack on the people of Midgard and Malekith's attempt to pervert our universe with the Aether, we have been vigilant and watchful that such objects do not find themselves on your planet."

"Okay," Bucky said, "So either it's Asgardian and someone worked pretty hard to get it here, or it's not Asgardian and we have no idea what it is, but the only similar objects we're aware of are weapons of mass destruction. Either way."

"Exactly," said Tony. "Hence, you know, Avengers assemble."

"We can be there in -- what?" Steve asked. "An hour, on the jet? What are we waiting for?"

"Technically we don't have jurisdiction of any kind," Clint spoke up from where he was seated with his feet on the table, leaning back in his chair. "The NSA is looking into it."

Bucky glanced at Steve. "Looking into it," he said.

"Right," Steve agreed. "Listen: If we can be there in an hour, and we have somebody who can, at the very least, identify whether it's Asgardian technology, we're two steps ahead of the NSA -- and whoever else -- already. Waiting didn't do us a lot of good in the Tesseract's case."

"Hell no it didn't," Clint said dryly.

"I'll change in the jet," said Bucky.

+++

He could tell there was something _wrong_ about the whole thing the second the jet touched down, though he couldn't say how, or why. They'd spent the entire way over talking out possible scenarios, all with the knowledge that when they were on the ground they had no idea at all what they were dealing with. It was the illusion of being prepared, which was the best they could really give themselves in the situation; Bucky had been here before, a lot of times, back in the war. Even with the most talented, most driven, most dedicated team of soldiers on the planet, you just never knew which way it would go in times like these. And that kind of uncertainty, frankly, never got less uncomfortable. Not for Bucky, anyway.

They landed in a field of sheared-down dead corn, and all of them piled out of the jet on high alert, except Banner, who stayed behind. "Any sign of the impact crater?" said Natasha, and from overhead, Tony answered back, "Negative, Widow. I'm at the coordinates, but -- there's nothing here."

"Say again?" said Natasha.

"There's nothing here," Tony said. "Zip, zilch, nada. No sign of an explosion of any kind."

Bucky glanced at Steve. "All right," Steve said, "Let's move out. Head for the town. Bucky -- Winter Soldier -- I want you on point. Widow, Hawkeye, you're with me. Thor, take our six. Iron Man -- you know what to do."

"Roger, Rogers," said Tony. "Air support, look out for bad guys, blow 'em up if necessary."

Bucky mouthed 'Roger, Rogers,' at Steve, who gave him an amused smirk, and then set off in front, rifle at the ready. They all fell into formation behind him, and he headed for the dusty dirt road that led through the field back toward the farmhouse. It was a big house, nice, newer construction. Most of the farms Bucky had seen lately had been like that -- farming had changed.

They tightened up when they got to the house. Steve knocked on the door, and then, when nobody answered, Bucky, Steve, and Natasha cleared it rapidly. It was weird -- it looked like somebody had just gotten up and _left_ ; the TV was still on, paused in the middle of Netflix. It did nothing for the unsettled feeling in the pit of Bucky's stomach.

Natasha held up a still-steaming mug of coffee, and they all looked at each other and went back out of the house, where Clint and Thor were waiting expectantly.

"Nobody in there," Bucky said. "Coffee's still hot."

Steve squared his shoulders. "Let's move on," he said, and they did, picking up the pace. The dirt road turned to gravel, and then to a paved one-lane highway, with a single roadsign that said _Cottonwood, 3._ They were moving quickly, and it wasn't much more than twenty minutes until they made it to the town; it was a small town, population south of a thousand, and there was just the one central hub, bordered on all sides by farmland and wilderness.

Bucky's feeling of unease increased, the closer they got. There were no cars coming or going. That in itself might not be so strange, but when they were within hearing range, the town was silent too, except for the buzz of electricity. There were no sounds of people talking, or of doors opening and closing. They stood on the edge of the town and watched the stoplights change -- red, green, yellow, red -- while no traffic moved.

All the cars Bucky could see were parked, empty. He moved forward, felt the rest of them fanning out behind him. "Iron Man?" he said, into his earpiece.

"I don't see anyone," Tony said. "I don't see a single person -- looks like there's nobody home."

The first building they came to was a gas station. Bucky walked up to one of the cars, still sitting at the pump, with the nozzle in the gas tank. It had shut itself off automatically when the tank was full, but it was just -- there was still a credit card in the pump's card reader. The keys were in the ignition.

"The building's empty," said Natasha. They moved on.

Everywhere they went -- the library, the post office with fans still running and mail sitting at the counter. Restaurants with half-eaten plates of food, pots boiling over on still-lit burners. "What the fuck," Bucky said under his breath, turning off a stove in a greasy diner. He glanced back at Steve. "Where is everybody?"

Steve visibly inhaled and exhaled again. "We have to be prepared," he said, shaking his head. "One of these buildings could be an ambush. The fire station might be a good place to trap us. Let's keep going."

Maybe the school was worst of all; there was all the detritus of a bunch of kids having been there just a few minutes ago. Pencils and books still sitting on desks. One chair with a small shoe underneath it. A half-written worksheet of multiplication tables. Or maybe it was the hospital: One of the beds Bucky touched was still warm, like somebody had just been lying there. And -- if they were in the hospital, what happened to them? If they just got up and walked out, what then? It would have been better if at least there was noise, the alarms of monitors suddenly flatlining, but again, there was nothing. All the monitors had been neatly turned off. There was an intentionality to it all. A deliberateness.

"I hate to tell you this," Tony said from overhead, "but I'm not picking up any heat signatures in the firehouse either. So unless they have some kind of hidden infrared-proof bunker, there's nobody there."

"We still have to clear it," Steve said stubbornly, and so they did. Tony was right. There was no bunker. No people. Just a kitchen with a hot pot of coffee, some magazines lying open on the counter. A bucket of soapy water in the garage with a sponge in it, next to the shiny red fire engine.

Steve stood to the side of the fire engine looking lost. "Wait," said Tony, "Wait, I'm getting something. I'm breaking off to go have a look. Edge of town, the ski course."

They all stood around staring at each other and waiting for Tony to say something else. "Guys," he said eventually, "you're going to want to see this."

"The ski course?" Steve said, and then they all set off at a sprint, eating up ground as fast as they were capable of, Thor doing that thing he did where he let his hammer carry him along. It was a sprint that ended in a dead stop when they saw what it was that Tony had found at the ski course.

It was the entire population of Cottonwood, Idaho. Men, women, kids. Postal workers, firefighters, waiters, teachers, doctors, patients. They were all standing there in a crowd, just standing there, staring straight out in front of themselves. Like automata, like machines where somebody had suddenly hit the stop button.

And then, as one, they all turned and looked at Steve, Bucky, Natasha, Clint, and Thor. The cold pit in Bucky's stomach clenched. He shouldered his rifle. Steve held up a hand -- _wait!_ \-- and Bucky stared at him, and then back out into the crowd of people.

"What happened here?" Steve shouted into the space between the two groups.

As if Steve had pulled some invisible trigger, all the people of Cottonwood surged forward like a wave. And they attacked.

+++

Some of them, the way they moved was strange. Clumsy, like they weren't used to moving their arms and legs. Those ones were the hardest to fight, not because they were _good_ fighters, but because Bucky wasn't trying to _kill_ , just subdue, and their bizarre, jerky movements made them unpredictable. He didn't have much time to communicate with the others; they were direly outnumbered, and all of them were focused on simply not being ripped to shreds. Steve had yelled, "Don't kill them!" before there were hands yanking on his uniform from all directions, and Bucky was doing his goddamn best to obey.

He wasn't doing that well. He knew he'd killed some of them. Sometimes training just took over. Sometimes you only meant to pull someone off yourself and then you snapped their neck instead. Thor had the lightning on his side, and he could control it well enough to shock people unconscious -- he'd been sent after the kids, and he was rounding up a corral of small, still bodies that Bucky couldn't take too long to think about. The kids would be okay. He -- all of them, really -- had to trust Thor to know what he was doing; they didn't have any other choice.

Tony was helping too. The blasts from his gloves were enough to scatter the masses back and at least leave them reeling for long enough that Steve, Bucky, Natasha, and Clint could get their footing back. Clint kept trying to get to high ground, an instinct that Bucky could identify with, but knew was pretty much entirely futile. Any advantage they gained, they almost immediately gave right back.

Natasha shouted, and Bucky saw Steve dive for her, out of the corner of his eye. And something about that kicked him into high gear, an inescapable corner of his mind he knew he couldn't get out of. He shouldered the rifle again. He started shooting people.

It went a lot faster this way. He cut a path through them and Clint scrambled up onto the roof of the ski lodge and began firing off volley after volley of arrows; they exploded when they impacted, and released some kind of cloud of gas that made their targets crumple. They got some leeway, at least, a radius of calm where they could stop to breathe, think, reload.

Natasha was leaning on Steve, a trickle of blood coming from her mouth. "Bucky!" Steve shouted. "Bucky, _stop shooting them!_ "

Bucky inhaled, reloaded, put a round into the knee of a middle-aged fireman lunging for Steve. "Stop shooting them!" Steve shouted again, sounding hoarse, desperate.

Telling Steve he didn't have a choice would be useless, Bucky thought, in this situation. But Bucky knew somehow, without even the shadow of a doubt, that if he stopped, they were going to die. And he didn't want to die. Not now. Not anytime soon.

It felt like it went on forever. Bucky could remember once thinking the same thing; they'd come up on the rear of a German battalion, and by that time there hadn't been a lot of them left. And they'd been standing on the crest of a wooded hill that hadn't been bombed to splinters yet, looking down at the encampment, and that was that Bucky had thought: It looked like they went on forever. All those men that they were supposed to kill, all those men that were their enemies.

It did end, though, because everything did. The ground was littered with bodies -- most of them alive, Bucky hoped -- and finally there were only a few of the townspeople left. Bucky couldn't stand to look back at Steve. He already knew what he'd see, and he was too exhausted to deal with the disappointment right now. He looked ahead, instead. There was a woman, not moving toward them, but just standing, now, her hands dangling by her sides.

He took a step toward her. There was a strange feeling in his stomach. A weird, inexorable pull. He didn't want to walk forward, not really, but he kept going, still holding the rifle at ready. "Bucky!" called Steve, and then, when Bucky didn't respond, "Soldier!"

He _did_ want to say something, but found he couldn't. Something heavy and damp settled on him that said, _don't do that_ , except not in words. And he couldn't do it. He tried to tell his feet to stop moving, but that didn't work either. It was like somebody had put a rope around his middle and was dragging him closer.

"Bucky!" said Steve's voice again, and then Natasha, joining in, "James!"

"You want me to go get him, Cap?" said Tony, and Bucky thought, _yeah, please do_ , but instead Tony hovered just out of reach. He and Steve were having some kind of conversation, but the closer Bucky got to the woman, the less of it Bucky could understand, like he was hearing them underwater or something.

" -- giving off some weird-ass radiological signs --" said Tony's voice.

" -- stop!" Steve was saying, "Don't look at her, Bucky, don't --"

Bucky didn't want to. He didn't. But it didn't matter; whether or not he _wanted_ to was irrelevant. He was close to her now, close enough to touch. He lifted his head, feeling heavy as a puppet made of lead and fishing-line,

and looked --

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha's toast simply means "to the newlyweds" for anyone curious. :)
> 
> Thanks for reading! A new chapter will be up soon.


	3. a wave

3.

It took about three days for Steve to spring him from the hospital. At least, three days was what Steve told Bucky; Bucky spent most of it drifting in and out of consciousness, not sure which he preferred more -- the blank emptiness of drugged sleep, or the hazy, discontent discomfort of being awake and in pain.

Some doctors came to talk to him a few times. To talk to him about his leg, when he could expect it to heal, how long he'd have to have the pins in. He supposed that it was mostly guesswork, because Bucky certainly healed at a different rate than anybody he assumed these doctors had ever worked with before. They showed him some scans of his brain and pointed out areas that were lit up with unusual activity. They told him he had likely suffered a concussion. There were unusual levels of hormones in his blood. None of them knew what any of it meant, and since Bucky didn't either, he mostly just sat there and looked blankly at them and nodded.

Every time he woke up, Steve was there. Bucky wondered if Steve left -- he must, he couldn't just be staying here all the time, considering there was only the one bed in the room. They didn't talk much, mostly because Bucky was too exhausted to hold a real conversation. Steve had given him the framework of it all, but couldn't fill in the details. Nobody knew the details.

It had been five months. It wasn't October or November like Bucky had thought, but February. When Steve told him, it sent this surge of fear through him, a profound discomfort, like -- how could all that time just be _gone_? Except that it was worse, because he had a perfect context for what it felt like to wake up and find days, months, or years gone by. It was just like coming back from the ice, except that in this case, Bucky didn't have a very good excuse for not remembering.

Anyway, on the third day, Fury and Carter and Steve came in with the doctors and a wheelchair, and Steve said, "I'm taking you back home."

As Steve said it, Bucky had a sense-memory of someone saying the same thing to him in Russian, once, and a bright light shining into his eyes from overhead. The doctors and nurses crowded around Bucky and unhooked him from all the machines, and he stayed still and placid because he knew that was the way to make it go as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

Steve helped him into the wheelchair, where Bucky couldn't help but stare down in awful fascination at the wreck of his leg again, and then Steve ruffled his hand through Bucky's hair and started pushing him out and down the hall. Fury walked beside them, the long tails of his coat flapping behind him, the click of Carter's boot heels on the tiled hallway.

Steve had to fill out some paperwork, and as he did, Fury leaned over to look at Bucky. Something in his gaze was very hard. "Nice of your husband to spring you," he said, putting particular emphasis on the word _husband._ "Congratulations, by the way. I was a little surprised to hear that news. Too bad you couldn't find it in your hearts to invite old Uncle Nick to the ceremony."

"He was my legal medical proxy before that," Bucky said. His mouth was dry. He wondered what Fury was getting at. Was Fury somehow bitter that Bucky seemed to have more sway over Steve than SHIELD ever had? Could be. He didn't want to think about it, right now. It was too complicated for him to try and figure out.

Steve came back over and gave Fury a look that Bucky was too far down to read properly. He turned Bucky's wheelchair kind of sharply to put him in the elevator. Bucky grabbed the side of it, feeling dizzy, whiplashed, like he'd been in a car accident. It wasn't until Steve was helping to load him into the sleek little jet waiting on the roof that Bucky realized he was still only wearing the hospital gown, and with that realization, that with the pins in his leg he didn't know how he was supposed to put clothes on at all.

"Steve," he said, as Steve buckled him in, and then, when Steve looked at him, "How am I gonna wear pants? Do I -- do I only wear one leg?"

Steve got a look on his face for a second, a sort of reluctant half a smile, like he almost thought what Bucky was saying was funny, and then it was replaced by a more unsettled expression. "Don't worry," he said. "Don't worry about it, Bucky. We'll figure it out when we get home, okay?"

"Okay," said Bucky. He didn't believe Steve, but he didn't have much choice about it, really. He leaned back, tilting his head against the cushion of the seat. Steve settled next to him, and reached over, touching Bucky's cheek, stroking with the backs of his fingers.

Bucky looked over at him. Steve didn't say anything else, just smiled a little, his expression relieved this time. Bucky didn't want to be awake. Whatever they'd been pumping through his veins at the hospital, he hoped it lasted the trip back to New York. He leaned against Steve, whose arm came around him. Steve smelled -- jesus, he smelled just the same. It was so familiar. That was like coming home all on its own. He closed his eyes.

+++

He woke up when the jet was touching down on the tower's rooftop landing pad, feeling disoriented. Steve was awake; he didn't really look like he'd slept at all. He had a familiar expression, his jaw set hard and his eyebrows furrowed, which dissolved, mostly, when he noticed Bucky waking.

"How are you going to," said Bucky, "with all this --" he gestured to his leg.

"I'm taking care of it," Steve said. "The tower has a lot of equipment. Tony said it shouldn't be a problem. We're going to make it work, okay?"

"I can't even walk," Bucky said.

"You'll be able to soon," Steve said. "And in the meantime, there's -- there are wheelchairs, or. I could carry you --"

"I'm not letting you carry me everywhere," Bucky said. "Jesus christ." He sat up. "You know they had me cathed, right? You're gonna help me into the bathroom every three hours and hold me up so I can take a piss?"

He didn't know what he was expecting. Steve was quiet for a moment. "Yeah, Bucky," he said. "If I need to."

Bucky scrubbed a hand over his face. He still felt exhausted, even though he'd just woken up from probably five or six hours of sleep, and the sense of clarity that came from whatever sedative he'd been on wearing off brought with it only an unpleasant itch of discomfort and profound unease.

He was saved from having to say anything else by Steve getting out of the helicopter and coming around to the side of it to help him out. He hadn't been lying about how helpless he was; it hurt much, much worse to put any weight on the leg now that it had all that metal in it, and he mostly sagged against Steve as Steve maneuvered him into another wheelchair, and then took him inside.

"Welcome back, Captain Rogers, Sergeant Barnes," said JARVIS, once they'd made it into the elevator, and Bucky managed a ghost of a smile for the familiar voice, but only a ghost: He could sort of see himself in the mirrored walls of the elevator now, his distorted reflection, and from what he could see, it wasn't good. Not that he thought it was going to be good, but --

Steve opened the door to their apartment, and the first thing Bucky saw was that Steve's easel wasn't in its usual place. There was no sign of it at all, in fact. "Hey," he said, "Where's --" and then the second thing he noticed was Sam, sitting at the kitchen island with the newspaper and a cup of coffee.

Sam turned toward them with an enormous smile, and to his credit it only faltered slightly when he got a good look at Bucky. "Hey, man!" he said, coming toward them, clapping his hand to Steve's bicep and then leaning down to very carefully give Bucky a hug, best he could with Bucky still in the wheelchair. "Good to have you back," he said to Bucky, and then, "Jesus, Rogers, you didn't even give the man the dignity of letting him change out of the hospital gown before you dragged him out of there?"

"I don't know how I'm going to wear pants anyway," Bucky said, lifting his leg up slightly.

"Sam sort of," said Steve, and then cleared his throat, "he moved into the guest room. I should have told you, but you were -- mostly asleep."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Hi, Sam."

"Hi, Bucky," Sam said. "You want a cup of coffee or anything? I made a whole pot. Wasn't sure when you guys would make it back."

"I don't know if my stomach could handle it right now," Bucky said. "But thank you. I do _want_ a cup of coffee." He twisted his head and glanced back at Steve. "I need to take a piss."

"All right," Steve said. He pushed the wheelchair toward the bathroom and then bent down so Bucky could slip an arm over his shoulders. At least he could take Bucky's weight easily, Bucky thought; it brought back a few memories of practically carrying a dead-drunk Steve home to their apartment, in the thirties. Steve had been a truly ungraceful hunk of lead to carry, even when he'd been about a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. Strange, to have their roles reversed now.

Steve got him in the bathroom and Bucky grabbed onto the counter with one hand, balancing all his weight on his good foot. Steve didn't leave, and Bucky said, "Can you just -- I got it from here, okay?"

"I can turn my back if you really want," Steve said.

Bucky shot him a look over his shoulder. It wasn't that he was shy about pissing in front of Steve -- christ, they'd been in the war together, and Steve had seen his dick enough times to probably draw it from memory by now. "I just want a minute," he said. "Please."

Steve's gaze turned suspicious, but he nodded after a moment, backing out of the bathroom and pulling the door closed behind himself. "Just call me when you're done," he said. "I'll get some clothes."

Bucky did his business, like he'd promised he would, and then he shifted himself hand-over-hand, hopping one-legged and trying not to jar the pins or the still-healing bone, to get a proper look at himself in the mirror. He looked. He -- he was --

He'd known that he had lost weight. He could see it when he'd looked at his leg, in the hospital. He'd known that he had at least a month's worth of beard, and that his hair was long and tangled. But -- looking at himself in the mirror, he looked like a sad skeleton somebody had slapped some skin, a wig, and a big metal arm on. It was almost funny, except it wasn't at all. The purple hollows under his eyes, his sunken cheeks, the unruly mess of beard and hair. He had to have lost thirty pounds, at least; he pulled the hospital gown off and fitted his fingers into the spaces between his ribs, staring, horrified.

"Bucky?" said Steve's voice, from outside the door, and then, after Bucky didn't answer, he opened it and came in, found Bucky standing there still totally naked with the hospital gown pooled at his feet. Steve's face twisted into an expression of pain, and he said, "Here, I brought some shorts and a t-shirt. They said it'd probably only be shorts until you get the stabilizer off, but that shouldn't be more than a week."

His hands landed on Bucky's arms, and he turned Bucky around so that Bucky was facing him, away from the mirror. "Put your hands --" Steve said, guiding Bucky's hands up to his shoulders, and then he did some kind of smooth move where he lifted Bucky's feet up just enough to get the shorts on. They were loose enough -- they must be workout shorts -- that they slipped over the contraption on his leg without incident. The shirt was easier to get on, and Bucky probably could have done it himself, but he didn't resist when Steve moved his arms around.

Steve pulled the tangled mess of Bucky's hair out of the collar of the shirt, and Bucky shivered. "There," Steve said quietly. "You okay?"

"I want to go to sleep," Bucky said numbly.

"Yeah," Steve said. "The doctors said you would probably be pretty tired for a couple of weeks at least. You want to get back in the wheelchair?"

"No," Bucky said. "Can I just lean on you?"

Steve nodded, and took most of Bucky's weight again as they went toward the bedroom. It was basically the same as Bucky remembered it, even his running shoes sitting by the closet door. Almost felt like nothing had happened, like no time had gone by at all. Steve gently laid Bucky down in bed and arranged the covers so that they weren't touching his bad leg, and then he started to lie down next to Bucky.

Bucky half-turned onto his side and tried to curl up away from him, but Steve's hand just stroked slowly down his back. "What are you doing, Buck?" Steve asked.

"I haven't even had a shower," said Bucky. "Jesus, I don't know how long it's been since I brushed my teeth."

Steve laughed. It wasn't a happy laugh, not really. "I don't care," he said.

"I know," Bucky said. "I do, though."

Steve sighed. His hand slid heavily along the too-prominent curve of Bucky's spine, under the thin t-shirt. "We'll take care of all of it when you wake up, okay?"

"Okay," Bucky said. He closed his eyes, and Steve's hand kept stroking him, petting him like you'd soothe a wild animal, long slow strokes. It felt good, as much as he didn't think he had it in him to be capable of feeling any kind of pleasure right now, and before long he fell asleep.

+++

He felt worse when he woke up. It made sense; most of the drugs they'd given him in the hospital had left his system, and the way his body worked, there were essentially two options: Either he could be drugged to the point that he was woozy and only halfway functional, or he could put up with the pain and have a clear head. Half-measures, the kinds of analgesics that would have worked on an ordinary person, provided no relief at all. His body just processed them too fast for them to be of any use.

Steve was asleep next to him, and after a few seconds, Steve stirred and opened his eyes. He looked at Bucky closely and then ran his hand over his face and through his hair. "How're you feeling?"

Bucky shrugged, and Steve nodded and sat up. "You hungry?" he asked, reaching down and shifting a strand of hair away from Bucky's forehead

"Yeah," Bucky said.

"They gave me some pretty strict guidelines on what I should give you and how much," said Steve. "They didn't want you getting -- what is it, Refeeding Syndrome, I think it's called."

"The stomach shrinks," Bucky said vaguely.

"Yeah," Steve said. "Anyway, uh -- do you want to eat in here, or go to the kitchen?"

"Kitchen," Bucky said, pushing himself up on his elbows and starting to maneuver his leg off the side of the bed. Steve came around and helped him up -- Steve had taken off his t-shirt and changed into sweatpants, Bucky saw, and there was a second where having Steve's skin pressed up against him was just too much, but it passed in a few dizzying moments.

Together they hobbled into the kitchen, and Steve sat Bucky down at the island with a minimum of incident, jarring Bucky's leg only once. It didn't really matter; Bucky's whole body was just a low buzz of pain all over and it was almost nice to have one sensation to focus on. "Where's Sam?" Bucky asked.

"I think he went to work," Steve said. "He's been working at the V.A. up here since he moved. A lot of his stuff is still in D.C.." He paused. "Neither of us really knew how long he was going to be here."

Bucky nodded, and Steve filled a glass of water from the tap and passed it over. "You're supposed to drink that slowly," Steve said, and Bucky met his eyes, nodded again, and did.

Steve was getting stuff out of the fridge. Eggs, potatoes, some vegetables. "They want you to see a doctor as soon as you're feeling up to it," he said. "Dr. Banner recommended somebody to me -- somebody for longer-term care, not just a hospital doctor, you know what I mean."

"Like a therapist?" Bucky asked.

"No, a -- somebody who can help with the physical stuff," Steve said. "I don't know how much of it is relevant; I don't know how fast it's going to go, considering how fast you and I heal. But I figure it's a good idea. Your leg, I mean, at least you'll need somebody for that."

Steve was talking so much that Bucky could tell he was still feeling unsettled himself, not that Bucky could blame him. "Sure," Bucky said. "Do we need to go out, or --"

"No, she'll come here," said Steve. "I told Pepper you were back, too. She'll want to see you."

Bucky didn't know if he wanted to see Pepper, in the state he was in. He'd left behind so many half-finished projects, and he wasn't sure when he'd be able to pick them back up. And he knew that she'd want to have a press conference -- or really, it wasn't that she'd _want_ to have a press conference, it was that they'd need to have a press conference, even as useless as it seemed given that Bucky couldn't remember a damn thing that had happened. "Let's--" he said, and then sighed, "I need to get cleaned up a little bit, and then we can -- with the doctor, or whatever."

"Yeah, of course," Steve said, looking over at him as he cracked eggs into a pan, a little bit taken aback, like he hadn't realized how much he made this all sound like it needed to happen right now. "You -- you're allowed to take all the time you need to feel better, you know that."

Bucky smiled slightly. He knew Steve meant it, but it wasn't true. There would, of course, be some particular prescribed amount of time that the rest of the world _thought_ was the right amount of time he should take to feel better, and beyond that -- well, anyway, he'd talk to the doctor. He'd do the press conference. He'd done this once before, he could do it again. It should be easier this time.

He took the plate when Steve passed it across, and ate it as slowly as he could manage. Steve watched him the entire time.

+++

They got in the shower after that, with Bucky's leg wrapped in a plastic bag to keep the water from getting in. He wished he could do it on his own, but there was no way, so he leaned against Steve and let Steve help him wash his hair and pretended that he didn't mind Steve seeing him all skin and bones. When he was finished, he sat on the toilet and let Steve trim the ragged ends of his hair and beard. "You want me to shave it off, too?" Steve asked, looking up at Bucky with the scissors in his hand.

"No," Bucky said. "Not yet." It was bad enough seeing how sunken his eyes were; at least the beard camouflaged the lower half of his face. He wasn't sure he could deal with his hollow cheeks and too-prominent Adam's apple too. Not right now.

"All right," Steve said. He toweled Bucky's face and hair gently, and then backed off, though Bucky could see a certain dissatisfaction in his eyes. The last time Bucky had had a beard this thick, after all, was in the months after the helicarrier.

Steve got Bucky dressed again, situated him out on the sofa with the remote and Steve's laptop within easy reach, and went to call that doctor. Bucky had the urge to reach for the laptop but didn't; he wasn't sure what he'd find on any of the many web news sites that he wasn't ready to see yet. And he wondered, too, where his own laptop was, even though he knew it'd be too painful to look at it just yet -- all the sites open, all the things he'd been working on just frozen in time the entire time his life had been ripped away from him.

He turned on the TV instead and switched on one of their game consoles, started sort of mindlessly playing GTA, just haphazardly ramming his car into whoever and whatever got in his way, seeing how much damage he could do. Steve came back in and sat down next to him, watched him for a little while, and then joined in. They raced each other around the city.

The doctor showed up after about forty-five minutes and Steve went to answer the door when JARVIS let them know she was here. She was very neat-looking, with fashionable thick-rimmed glasses and long blonde hair. "Hello," she said, smiling at Bucky and then bending down to shake his hand. She moved around toward the armchair at the right side of the coffee table and got out a tablet and a folder full of paperwork. "I'm Angela Peshawar. It's nice to meet you."

"James Barnes," Bucky said. "I take it you already know Steve."

"We spoke on the phone," Dr. Peshawar said, stepping around the table to shake Steve's hand too. "A pleasure to meet you in person, Captain Rogers." She took a seat and looked keenly between them. "I trust you'll tell me, Sergeant Barnes, if at any point you'd prefer that our conversation be more private."

Bucky shrugged. "It's fine," he said. "Whatever you have to say to me, you can say it in front of Steve."

Steve sat back down and put his hand on Bucky's shoulder, squeezed. "All right," Dr. Peshawar said. "Down to business, then. I'm sure the doctors at the hospital already spoke to you about your physical condition. How have you been feeling?"

"Tired," Bucky said. "Everything hurts."

Dr. Peshawar nodded. "I'm afraid that's to be expected," she said. "In addition to the physical injuries, you also had some very strange bloodwork come back from the lab. Elevated levels of adrenaline, serotonin, and a few other chemicals that we haven't been able to identify. Essentially you were operating at a very high level of alertness for a very long time, and now that your body and your metabolism are returning to a more normal state, you're going to be experiencing a withdrawal."

She flipped open the file and showed Bucky the papers -- the bloodwork, and apparently they'd done a spinal tap on him at some point. The numbers were all printed in red, with the normal ranges next to them in black. "Now, I can't say exactly what this withdrawal is going to be like, or how long it's going to last," she said gently. "But there are some commonalities in all withdrawals that you can expect: Fatigue, which you've already said you're experiencing. Depression. Body aches. Decreased appetite. Normally we could medicate for these symptoms, but as I'm sure you know, the efficacy of the medication we would use on an ordinary person would be very low for you."

Bucky nodded. "Of course, if the symptoms become more severe, we have options," said Dr. Peshawar. "And we can discuss those as the need arises. Currently, how would you rate your pain, on a scale of one to ten?"

Bucky stared at her for a second. He had no idea how to answer that question; his pain tolerance had two settings, more or less -- _bearable_ and _unbearable._ "Four," he said eventually.

"Okay," Dr Peshawar said. "May I look at your leg?"

Bucky nodded again, and Dr. Peshawar came and sat down next to him on the couch, peering at his leg where it was propped up on the table. She moved around the dressings carefully. "I'll change these for you today," she said, "but it appears the incision is mostly healed, which is concurrent with what I know about your healing factor. I'd like to have it x-rayed -- Mr. Stark said that you have the technology available in the building?"

"Yes," Steve said. "We can x-ray it for you, and e-mail it to you, if that's okay."

By 'e-mail' Steve probably meant a more complex file transfer system than that, but Dr. Peshawar seemed to understand, nodding. "I'm going to change the bandages now," she said to Bucky, who wished he could look away, but couldn't. She got out some antiseptic and rubber gloves, put a sterile cloth down, and gently lifted Bucky's leg to sit on top of it. When the bandages came off, Bucky swallowed to see the stark black line of stitching against his skin, but she was quick about it, and when she put them back on it actually looked much nicer. Neater, with the clean white dressings and surgical tape.

"There we are," she said when she was done, sitting back and stripping off the rubber gloves, dropping them into a plastic bag and sealing them in along with the old dressings and the sterile cloth. She smiled at Bucky. "I wish all my patients sat through that so well."

Bucky had a lot of experience being obedient and cooperative during medical procedures. He smiled weakly back at Dr. Peshawar. "I'd like to ask you about one further thing, before I leave, if that's all right," she said.

"Go ahead," Bucky said.

"Your doctors in the hospital noted that you stated multiple times that you have no memories of the past five months," said Dr. Peshawar. "Is that correct?"

Bucky nodded. "The last thing I remember," he said slowly, "is being in Idaho. And then I woke up in -- I guess they said it was Scotland. Between that, nothing."

Dr. Peshawar nodded. "In the images we have of your brain," she said, "there doesn't appear to be any physical damage to the areas that we associate with short-term memory. And your long-term memory appears to be unimpaired." She held up a hand, presumably to forestall Steve, who seemed like he was about to say something. "The absence of any concrete brain damage doesn't preclude the existence of amnesia," she said. "Psychological amnesia is very real, and it's a very valid defense mechanism. A lack of physical damage doesn't in any way call into question the validity of your memory loss." She smiled a little. "It just makes it a bit harder to pin down. We don't know how to treat it, or in fact, if we should attempt to recover those memories, when your mind clearly saw fit to block them out. We don't know how, if, or when they might return. So I'm afraid I can't give you any answers there."

"They came back before," Bucky said, turning the tablet toward himself and looking at the blue-and-white picture of his brain, thinking how strange it was that that was him, that chunk of meat, that image, that was all his memories and thoughts, his whole personality. "They could come back again."

"They very well could," Dr. Peshawar agreed. "There is a precedent for that. However, both of the cases of memory recovery that we know of -- both yours, Sergeant, and yours, Captain, those were both the result of physical trauma which subsequently healed itself." She spread her hands apart, palms up, in a placating gesture. "For this, we just have to wait and see."

"Okay," Bucky said. He smiled thinly. "I'm not going to be going anywhere anytime soon."

Dr. Peshawar gave a quiet laugh. "Do you have any further questions for me?" she asked, and when she tilted her head, Bucky realized she wasn't asking him alone; she was including Steve in that.

"I don't have any questions," Bucky said, and looked at Steve, who clearly did.

"Thank you for coming," Steve said, standing up, shaking her hand again. "We really appreciate it. Dr. Banner said you're very busy, and it means a lot to us that you'd take time out."

Bucky shifted, uncomfortable that Steve was drawing attention to all the special treatment Bucky was getting. Just getting it at all was bad enough. "I'll see you again soon," Dr. Peshawar said, touching Bucky's shoulder as she got up. He managed another small smile for her, and as she and Steve walked back toward the entryway, Bucky could hear Steve quietly asking her questions that he apparently didn't realize Bucky was still privy to.

He turned the tv back on.

+++

A couple of hours later, the front door opened while Bucky was halfway dozing on the couch in a haze of irritated discomfort and Steve was making him another small meal of whatever doctor-approved foods he was allowed to eat. "Hey," Sam's voice said, quiet. The sound of his keys rattling. "How's it going? Is he --"

"I think he's asleep," Steve said, equally quiet, in response.

"I'm awake," Bucky interjected, shifting a little. Sam came over and leaned over the back of the couch to grin at him, then headed back into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water.

He had two, when he came back, and set one within easy reach of Bucky, before situating himself on the couch too, clearly with a care for Bucky's leg, which remained unjostled. "How's it going?" he asked Bucky.

Bucky shot him a glance, and Sam said, "That good, huh? Hey, you look better. Not quite so much like a crazed mountain man. You trimmed the beard up, I see."

"Steve did," Bucky said, reaching for the glass of water and taking a sip. "The doctor came by."

"Oh yeah," Sam said. "Dr. -- what was her name?"

"Peshawar," Bucky said. "Angela Peshawar."

"What'd she have to say?" Sam asked. "Anything useful?"

"Asked me how I was," Bucky said. "I said shitty. She said, well, you're going to feel shitty for a while."

Sam shook his head, laughing ruefully. "How _do_ you feel?" he asked. "I mean, really."

"Hungover," Bucky said. "Except the entire body instead of just the head. Fucking exhausted."

"Yeah," Sam said. "Sounds about right." He smiled at Bucky. "I'm glad you're back, though."

"Thanks," said Bucky. "I'm -- going to be fucking glad when I get this metal contraption off my leg." He sat up, putting his arm over the back of the couch so he could see what Steve was doing; he was incredibly hungry, Dr. Peshawar's implications about a decreased appetite be damned. Steve caught his eye, shook his head, and brought a plate over to him after a minute longer.

"How was work?" Steve said, dropping into the chair where the doctor had sat earlier.

"Eh," Sam said. "It was okay. Valentine's Day coming up brings up a lot of painful memories for some folks. Hell, it brings up some painful memories for those of us who _didn't_ get dumped after we came back from combat." He grinned. "Most of what I do around holidays just feels like damage control, you know? You distract people from the unproductive trains of thought, get them to focus on something positive, and before they know it, the holiday's over and they can get on with life."

Steve nodded, and Bucky tried to look as attentive as possible while he was shoveling food into his mouth. "Jesus, Barnes," said Sam good-naturedly. "What would your mother say?"

Steve snorted. "She'd be too busy trying to keep food out of Bucky's sisters' hair and off their dresses to say much of anything," he said. "Or it was: 'he's a growing boy, let him eat.'"

"I never had bad table manners," Bucky said. "I was just hungry. Christ, I grew five inches one summer, of course I was hungry."

"Yeah, I remember," Steve said fondly. "After the serum, that took some getting used to, for me. I just wasn't used to being that hungry, or eating that much. I thought to myself a couple of times, was this what Bucky felt like, going through those growth spurts?"

"You grew what, a foot, in the space of about a minute and a half?" Bucky said.

"Ten inches," Steve said.

"Still," Bucky said. "Hell of a growth spurt."

+++

As it turned out, Bucky didn't have a choice about letting Pepper see him; she showed up one day while Sam was at work and Steve had run out to get groceries. Bucky was ensconced in what had become his usual position on the couch, messing around on Steve's laptop. What had started out as an intense aversion the first few days had matured into the opposite of that -- a need to know as much as he could, even from an outside perspective. It wasn't very helpful, anyway. Most of the photos were grainy and far-away, and the information he got wasn't a lot more than what Steve had already given him.

"Sergeant Barnes?" said JARVIS, interrupting Bucky's train of thought and startling him a little. "Miss Potts is here to see you."

Bucky was silent. "Shall I tell her you are not at home?" JARVIS asked eventually.

"No, of course she knows I'm here," Bucky said. "You could -- tell her I'm asleep -- no, you know what, don't do that. Just let her in."

"Of course, sir," said JARVIS cooperatively, and a few seconds later Bucky heard the familiar tapping of Pepper's shoes on the floor.

"James?" she said, sounding a little confused. He sat up from the slouch he'd slid down into, putting his arm over the back of the couch and waving at her; as she came into view, he saw that she had a big bouquet of flowers, just like she'd brought him in the hospital last Christmas. Or -- the Christmas before last, now.

She looked perfect. She looked just the same; her hair was swept up into a neat ponytail, and she was wearing a tasteful grey silk blouse with a simple jacket and black pants. Bucky felt almost sick, realizing how profoundly, how much he'd missed her. It wasn't like missing Steve; that was expected, the horrible depth of it, but there was something about Pepper's impossible, impeccable stability in this whirlwind of a life that he hadn't known had dug its claws so deep into him. "Hi," he said.

Pepper set the vase of flowers down on the kitchen island and looked at him for a moment with big blue eyes, not smiling. Then she came over and sat down on the couch with him, oh-so-careful, and took one of his hands in both of hers. "Hi," she said, and she did smile then, a smile that lasted only as long as she was looking at his face, and fell away as soon as she caught sight of his leg. "God, your leg --" she said, her fingers squeezing his hand.

"Yeah, I know," Bucky said. He reached up with his free hand and brushed her bangs back from her face. "And the rest of me, too."

Pepper laughed. "I was going to try and come up with something nice to say about the beard," she said. "But it's -- um, it's not as unfortunate as when Tony just had this thin mustache -- it made him look like a pervert -- but I really think I prefer you without it."

"That's okay," Bucky said. "It's just for dramatic effect."

Pepper laughed again, and then she let go of his hand and leaned in and hugged him, tight. She was stronger than she looked, he always had to remind himself of that. "I really missed you," she said. "I'm so glad you're okay."

"I know," Bucky said. "I know, I know. I missed you too." He shook his head, looking at the flowers where she'd left them, big and bright. "You know I think you're the only person who's ever brought me flowers."

"Well, it seemed like a nice thing to do," said Pepper, smoothing one hand over his hair and then wiping her eyes with the other. "Um, not to bombard you with business, but I think you should know -- I made sure your projects were taken care of. Some of them I temporarily reassigned, some of them were put on hold, but when -- if -- you feel ready to step back in, they're waiting for you." She smiled. "Dr. Su was very sad that you weren't the lead contact on her project anymore. I've never seen her get so attached to her corporate liaison before."

Bucky laughed a little. Dr. Su was a forty-five-year-old, five-foot-tall firebrand who was fond of composing ill-advised screeds via e-mail when practices and procedures were not up to her exacting standards. He would have been lying if he didn't know exactly why she had been so charmed by him; he had gotten pretty used to dealing with his own ill-advised firebrand, after all. "I don't know," he said, "I don't know when that's going to be. I'm sleeping like fourteen hours a day right now. My head feels like it's filled with steel wool most of the time."

"It's okay," Pepper said quickly. "It's totally okay. I just want you to know, it's still there for you." She paused. "I suppose Steve probably already told you this, but we'll need to have a press conference eventually. You know how it is; the longer we go without saying anything about it --"

"I know," Bucky said.

"And," said Pepper, "if you'll forgive me, this is going to sound really crass, but for the sake of publicity, too, it might be better if we do it sooner rather than later."

Bucky laughed. "You're saying we should do it while I still look like shit," he said, and before she had a chance to protest, "No, you're right. I do look like shit. And I know what you mean -- like I said, the beard, for dramatic effect. I just -- I can't really stand up right now, and if we could just wait until I get the pins out, I'd like to at least be standing."

"Of course," Pepper said. "Of course." She smiled slightly, the corner of her mouth hooking upward. "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but David is really glad you're back too."

"David?" Bucky said. "David from PR David?" He shook his head. "What, he missed me making his entire job a lot more difficult, or what?"

Pepper blinked at him, looking startled. "No," she said. "No, James, he really likes you. He enjoys working with you. I thought you knew that."

Bucky stared at her for a second, and then said, "Sorry, that was a fucking weird thing to say." He shook his head again, squeezing the bridge of his nose. "I'm just -- my head's a mess. Like I said."

"It's okay," Pepper said. "I just want you to know that a lot of people missed you. Not just Steve, or me, or any of the rest of your friends." She smiled. "And I'm glad you're back."

She stood up, seeming to sense somehow that even that amount of conversation had worn him out. "I have to go. I have to get to this charity thing that Tony has been really gung-ho about. I think he's hoping to squeeze some money out of the one percent -- not like he needs it."

"I was gonna say," Bucky said. "Isn't he basically the one percent all by himself?"

Pepper rolled her eyes and laughed. "I think he'd actually be flattered you said that," she said. She smiled fondly and reached down to touch the top of Bucky's head. "Let me know about the press conference, okay? Whenever you feel able. And don't be a stranger; we live in the same building, that would be kind of ridiculous."

"Okay," Bucky said.

"Like I said," Pepper said. "I'm glad you're back. Don't forget to water the flowers."

"I won't," Bucky said, and then, belatedly, as she walked back toward the front door, "Thanks!"

She turned and smiled at him again, and then she slipped out.

+++

Tony, of course, had all the equipment and more to take images of Bucky's leg, and the know-how to do it; he wouldn't have been Tony Stark, noted technological genius, Bucky thought with some amusement, if he didn't. "Heck," said Tony, pulling up the scans on a big floating screen in the middle of the room so Bucky could see exactly how many pieces his tibia had broken into and how deep the screws went, "I could probably do surgery here! I mean, technically I _have_ done surgery here, just not under general anesthesia."

"There's no way you're doing any kind of surgery on Bucky here," said Steve, who was standing off to the side with his arms folded. "There's no way I'm _letting_ you do any kind of surgery on Bucky here."

"C'mon, it could be fun," Tony said, slapping a hand against Bucky's shoulder. "It could be like a team-bonding experience. You don't know a guy until you've had your hand inside him, right? Pepper's had her hand inside _me._ All the way in that chest cavity."

"You make that sound a lot less appealing than it could," Bucky said. "And while I admire your entrepreneurial spirit, I think I'm gonna say thanks but no thanks and just go to the hospital." He dredged up the best smile he could manage; usually he was perfectly capable of playing along with Tony's off-color jokes, but the idea of having someone who wasn't medically trained messing around with him when he wasn't sedated was -- a little too close to home for comfort, right now.

"I can tell Rogers has been rubbing off on you," Tony muttered, sending the files off to Dr. Peshawar. "You're less and less fun every time I see you."

Bucky gestured to his leg, which wasn't in any way conducive to any kind of fun at all, and Tony said, "Okay, fine, I get it. Go back to your old man cave. Come find me when you're fun again; I need you there for parties. You have no idea how bad the Christmas party was this year. Mariah Carey all night long."

"Thanks for the scans," Bucky said. For all Tony's bullshit, he _was_ helping -- it was just that he seemed to need to cover anything nice he did with a thinly-laid veneer of sarcasm and mockery, which was especially grating now when Bucky was already feeling like a raw, exposed nerve all the time. The state of constant low-grade pain was always there at the back of his mind, taking up space that he'd normally devote to other things. He grabbed the wheels of his wheelchair and started to wheel back out.

They got an e-mail back from Dr. Peshawar within the hour, saying she wanted to schedule the pin removal for next Friday, tentatively, pending a couple more scans she wanted sent in the next few days. It seemed a little weird to Bucky, scheduling something on the assumption that he'd be healed enough by then, but he also wasn't about to complain about it. He wanted the pins out as soon as possible too.

He wasn't doing anything around the house. He was still sleeping a lot more than normal, and when he was awake, half the time he couldn't summon enough brainpower to concentrate on anything meaningful. He read the same news articles over and over again, hoping and failing to jog any kind of memory. But maybe, like Dr. Peshawar had said, it was for the best.

+++

The following Friday, he found himself in a hospital room again, with Steve helping him change back into one of those goddamn hospital gowns so they could get the procedure underway. Steve was looking at him intently, concentrating so keenly on what he was doing, tying the back of the gown shut. His eyes were downcast, shadowed by their curtain of dark eyelashes. A line had drawn itself between his eyebrows.

Bucky felt profoundly guilty for a second. He and Steve had barely had a conversation since Steve had come to get him in the hospital the first time. The only time Bucky had almost managed to work up the energy had been briefly, with Pepper, and a couple of times with Sam. For Steve, who deserved the best of whatever Bucky had to give, he'd barely been able to give more than one-word answers to questions about simple necessities.

"There you go," said Steve, and Bucky rolled onto his back. Steve smiled a little. "Dr. Peshawar should be in in a minute. You want me to stay?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Please."

A nurse came in and got him prepped for the IV, and then Dr. Peshawar appeared with the latest pictures of Bucky's leg and talked to him about what they were going to do. He tried to listen, he did, but instead spent most of it in a fog thinking about a thread from the hospital gown that was tickling his shoulder. He came back a little when Steve's hand landed on his shoulder; he looked at Steve questioningly.

"I have to go now, okay?" Steve said. "They're going to start the anesthesia. But I'll be here when you wake up."

Bucky nodded. Steve bent down and kissed his forehead, and then he got up and left the room. After that, the anesthesiologist must have come in and started the drip, but that wasn't the last thing Bucky remembered. The last thing Bucky remembered was watching Steve go out, watching the door close behind him.

+++

He woke up and looked down at his leg immediately. It was bandaged, but all the goddamn metal was gone, and he put his head back against the pillow and sighed. "Hey," Steve said. "You awake?"

"Yeah," Bucky said.

"They gave me some water and crackers to give you when you feel up to it," Steve said, scooting closer in his chair. "How are you feeling?"

"Loopy," Bucky said. "Can I have some water?" He reached up and rubbed at his sandpapery eyes, then tried -- and failed -- to accept the container of water when Steve put it in his hand, and had to settle for drinking out of the straw while Steve held the cup instead.

"They said it looks pretty good," Steve said after Bucky was finished. "We can go home tonight, and you should be able to use crutches from here on out, until you feel like you can put weight on it."

"They have any idea how long that might be?" Bucky asked.

Steve shrugged. "A couple of weeks," he said. "Maybe sooner. I don't know. It's been a while since I've broken any bones, and none of them were broken as badly as your leg."

"Yeah," Bucky said. He still had no idea what _had_ happened, to shatter it like that, but he knew it had to have been bad. The only thing he could remember enough to compare it to was losing his arm. That had been worse, but the height he'd fallen from to do that kind of damage -- he shivered.

"Cold?" Steve asked.

"Little bit," Bucky said. "Can I get dressed, or do they have to come in and hem and haw over me some more before I'm officially allowed to leave?"

"I don't know," Steve said. "Let me go get somebody." He stood up, set the empty cup of water aside, and headed out of the room. Bucky drifted thoughtlessly while he was gone. He wasn't in pain for the first time in a while, but he knew it'd come back, and he still couldn't decide if he preferred the pain with its accompanying clearheadedness or the current sensation of unreality, like he was floating somewhere just outside of himself.

"You can get dressed," Steve said when he came back. "They want to give us some discharge instructions. I don't know why, Dr. Peshawar already told me while you were still out. But then we can go."

"Okay," Bucky said. "That's fine." He sat up, and Steve brought over the overnight bag he'd packed and pulled out a clean t-shirt and sweats for Bucky, who was grateful that now at least his leg sort of fit into pants and he didn't have to just keep wearing athletic shorts. A nurse came in and showed Bucky how to use the crutches, even though he knew how to use crutches and anyway they wanted him wheeled out in the wheelchair, in case he was still unsteady from the drugs. She went through the whole routine with Bucky, don't get the incision wet, change the bandages every day, any change in pain level, any swelling, discoloration, come in right away. He nodded and said "okay" at the appropriate places and had no idea if she could tell he wasn't really listening to her at all.

He held the crutches across his lap as Steve wheeled him out, ate crackers in the back of the car on the way home, and then immediately fell asleep again once he was in his own bed. He woke up with Steve wrapped around him, Steve's arm warm around his waist and his breath whistling in Bucky's ear, stirring strands of Bucky's hair so that they shifted ticklishly against Bucky's neck. His leg hurt again. A fresh pain, but more localized to the site of the incision now.

"Stop that," he said eventually, and Steve shifted and said 'hmm?', his hand sliding under Bucky's t-shirt, his fingers pressing against Bucky's stomach. "I said quit," Bucky said. "You're breathing right in my ear."

"Sorry," Steve said. His hand slipped up, catching on Bucky's ribs, and Bucky sat up, pulling out of Steve's grip and running his own hand through his hair. Steve rubbed his eyes. "What's up?"

"I should go e-mail Pepper," Bucky said. "I told her I wanted to wait until I had the pins out, but we need to have a press conference."

Steve groaned, rolling onto his back. "Jesus, you know how this works," Bucky said. "The longer I just let it sit there, the worse it gets. At least we've got a chance to head it off at the pass."

"Yeah," Steve said. "If only that _did_ actually work. You know it doesn't."

Bucky sighed. "It doesn't matter," he said. "The attention's going to come. This way at least I'm putting my version out there too." His version, which amounted to: I can't remember shit, please believe me. But like Pepper had said, it would be better than nothing. "Where'd you put the crutches?"

Steve wordlessly got up and went over to get them, and Bucky took a minute to figure out how to lever himself up on them without putting pressure on his leg. He crutched rapidly out into the living room, where he found a surprised-looking Sam sitting in front of the TV watching something on mute with closed-captions.

"Hey," Sam said. "I kind of thought you guys would be out for the rest of the day, I didn't want to wake you up. How'd the surgery go?"

"It was good," Steve said from behind Bucky. "Everything went smoothly."

"No more pins," Bucky said. He realized he had no idea what time they'd gotten home, or what day that had been, if today was a different day, or just later the day of the surgery. He flipped open his laptop. It said _1:10:21 PM_ ; even with Bucky's fucked-up sleep schedule, it didn't make sense that Sam would think Steve would still be asleep now, he thought.

"What are you watching?" Steve asked, and he went over to sit on the couch, running a hand through his sleep-rumpled hair. He and Sam started in on a conversation about _No Reservations_ , and Bucky shook his head and sent Pepper an e-mail, CC-ing David in on it.

+++

He didn't bother cleaning himself up much for the press conference. There wasn't a lot he could do, anyway; he still couldn't wear anything other than loose pants, and as for the rest of him, it was what it was. David had nervously suggested maybe they put some makeup on, just under the eyes, and then he had laughed and said, "No, I think that's actually defeating the purpose," which was true but didn't make Bucky feel any better about himself.

So there he was, in slip-ons, sweatpants, and a t-shirt, unshaven, his hair pulled back into a messy knot, crutching out to meet the press. He'd been here many times before, but he didn't think he'd ever felt as much like a prey object being scrutinized by the hunters as he did today.

He put his folder on the podium and opened it. The fact that many of the faces looking at him expectantly were familiar didn't make much of a difference at all; in fact, the longer he looked at them, the less he started to see any of them as anything individual. More just a single mass, a blur of humanity, waiting for him. "Good afternoon," he said eventually. "Thank you for coming. I've prepared a statement."

"On the afternoon of October third," he said, "A team, consisting of myself, Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor, and the Hulk travelled to Cottonwood, Idaho, to investigate an object impact site which was emitting anomalous readings. Upon arrival, as you know, we found no evidence of the object itself, and investigation of the town led to the discovery of its residents, apparently under the influence of mind control, and subsequent, unavoidable conflict. It was at some point during that battle that I also fell under the influence of what is now believed to be some kind of extraterrestrial being."

He took a breath. "I have no memory of the intervening five months between then and when I awoke somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. I have since become aware that during this period, while under the influence of this unknown being, I committed many acts of violence, sometimes against innocent people. While I want to stress that I was not, at the time, in control of my actions, I also know that it's a poor excuse, and I want to also say that I sincerely regret that I was forced to hurt anyone."

A clamor started to arise in the back. "I'm not finished yet," Bucky said, his voice rising, his fingers gripping the folder more tightly than he wanted them to. "I will, of course, cooperate fully with any investigation of these events and my role in them. As fully as I'm able. But I am still recovering, and I also want to ask for respect and privacy at this time." He swallowed. "I know that a lot of you know me pretty well by now. And I know it's hard to understand the fact that I don't have any answers. Nobody wants answers more than me, believe me. But I hope that you know me well enough to know that I am sorry. And I'll do what I can to help."

"Thank you," he said. "No questions today, please."

He closed the folder and put it under his arm, picked up his crutches where they were leaning against the podium, and started to walk off, back to where Steve and David and Pepper were waiting for him. And as he went, the clamor arose again, and it got louder and louder -- a cacophony of people shouting over top of each other so much that all the words became indistinct. It became just a roar, a wall of sound like a wave crashing over him. When the wave finally broke, he felt the feeling of being submerged, that peculiar underwater sensation where everything was muffled. Everything was very, very far away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As David from PR has become a recurring character in this universe, it seems worth noting that he should be pictured as played by Aziz Ansari.
> 
> Thanks for reading! [Come say howdy on tumblr!](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com)


	4. tea flower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For specific notes regarding the updated tags, see the end of the chapter.

04.

Pain. A lot of it.

Like a flower blooming. Or -- no, that wasn't it. It was. A pot of tea. Something he'd seen one time. Maybe more than once. You put the flower in the hot water and it opens up. Meaningless sensations. Meaningless --

You have something to do. Pay attention. The pain doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Doesn't.

He was ignoring it. He _was_. He was continuing to walk toward the building. The thing inside the building was important. The pain was not important. He had to find out. They had to find out. Everything was shaking. He was breathing so hard. His vision was -- blurry. _I don't understand._ What don't you understand? What's the pain? Why the feeling?

It felt like it was taking tremendous effort just to walk. Feet didn't want to go. _God_ it hurt. Opening up inside him. Well, he kept going. It was more important. The building, he had to get to the building. _The things the human mind draws up in times of great stress can be astonishing._ A pot of tea.

He was trying. He was. The edges of his vision were closing in, though. A blackness creeping in, even through the urge to keep going. Raggedly, he breathed in and out through his mouth. A rattling sound. Keep going. Keep --

He fell forward. Everything went black. Relief.

When he came back to himself, he wasn't actually walking toward a building at all; he was standing in front of the refrigerator with the door of it open wide, staring at all the food inside. That was it -- the pain had been hunger and exhaustion, he realized. The thing that had taken him had been incorporeal. It wasn't used to existing in a physical body. It had taken it a while to understand.

The people in Cottonwood, it had only been with them for a couple of hours. So it had been unprepared for the nuances of long-term existence in a physical organism. And it had had to learn the right degree of autonomy to give Bucky, so that it didn't just -- it would ride him into the dirt, if it forgot. The times when it only let him do what it wanted him to, he wouldn't be able to eat or sleep or drink until he had finished. Sometimes that was an hour. Sometimes a day. Sometimes a week.

He had the distinct sense memory of pissing himself, a couple of times, and this shock of disapproval and disgust that had come from the being. Disapproval and disgust in those situations was fairly normal, but it was somehow sharper because of this sense of _how messy, how inefficient_ his whole means of existing was. Eventually it had figured things out. It had fine-tuned its grasp over his mind so that he could piss, eat, drink, catch just enough sleep to keep going, but it hadn't let go so much that he'd _wanted_ to do anything other than obey it. All it really needed was a mindless automaton who was familiar enough with human life to guide it.

Guide it where? Through what? he wondered. He leaned forward into the fridge, letting the cold air wash over his sweaty face.

"Bucky?" said Steve. Bucky blinked, looked over at him, could barely see him in the dark. It was about three in the morning. All the lights were off, except the glow from the fridge.

Steve came over. "What are you doing?" he asked, and then, looking closer at Bucky, "Were you sleepwalking? Are you okay?"

"No," Bucky said. "I came out here on purpose. I wanted something to eat."

Steve nodded and backed off a little, leaning on the island. He was still looking at Bucky, though. "You just," he said eventually, "You have that look on your face."

"What look?" said Bucky.

"The one where you're remembering something you don't necessarily want to remember," said Steve.

"Just -- nothing," Bucky said. "It's nothing. Don't worry about it."

Steve gave him a look that said _yeah right_. "You know what you want to eat?" he asked. "You've been out of bed for about fifteen minutes."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Yogurt." He reached for the container, pulled it out, and spooned some into a bowl for himself. Steve sat down next to him at the island and watched him eat, his chin in his hand. Bucky was back to mostly being able to eat whatever he wanted, at this point; his bloodwork had come back fine, he was no longer in danger of any kind of severe nutritional imbalance. But, curiously, now that he _could_ eat, sometimes he didn't want to. Like Dr. Peshawar had said. Decreased appetite. He'd get hungry, and then he'd go look at all the food and absolutely none of it looked like anything he had any desire to eat.

He rinsed the bowl out and put it in the dishwasher when he was done, and Steve came up behind him. His hand landed on Bucky's back and drew a line down parallel to Bucky's spine, then stopped. "Jeeze," he said quietly. "You're -- drenched in sweat, Buck. You sure you're okay?"

He turned Bucky around and rested his hand on Bucky's forehead, his palm cool against Bucky's hot skin. Checking for a fever. "I should probably rinse off," Bucky said. "Before I come back to bed."

"Might not be a bad idea," Steve said. His hands dropped to Bucky's hips, which -- were still a good sight more prominent than they should be. He leaned in. Kissed Bucky. Sweet, careful. Bucky let him.

One of Steve's hands came back up after a second, cupping Bucky's jaw and then sliding into his hair. He'd gotten rid of the beard, after the press conference, and now all that remained was long stubble he could feel prickling against Steve's faint five-o-clock shadow. Steve's lips parted, and his tongue darted out to press against Bucky's lower lip, asking permission.

"I gotta get in the shower," Bucky said, muffled against Steve's mouth. Steve pulled back like he'd been burnt, looking at Bucky for a split second, and then at the ground.

"Okay," he said. "All right. I'm gonna go back to bed."

+++

When he woke up again a few hours later, he came out into the living room to find Natasha sitting there, checking her phone. Sam and Steve were nowhere to be seen, which meant Sam must have succeeded in convincing Steve to leave the house, however briefly. "You just let yourself in?" he asked Natasha.

"Steve let me in," Natasha said. "He and Sam went for a run. He told me you were asleep and I said I'd wait."

"Better chance for ambush that way," Bucky said, going to the tap and pouring himself a glass of water. He didn't ask her what she wanted; that was never a useful question, with Natasha. He'd find out, but she wouldn't tell him.

"How's your leg?" she asked, and then, "Is there coffee?"

Bucky lifted up the leg of his sweats to show her the shiny pink skin where the incision was still healing, and turned the coffee maker on. He still couldn't really drink it, it did a number on his stomach that left him feeling like he was full of battery acid, but Steve and Sam would probably want some when they came back from their run.

"Are you off the crutches?" Natasha asked.

"Depends how far I'm walking," Bucky said.

"Well, you haven't left the tower in -- how long has it been?" Natasha said pointedly.

"The fuck am I going to go?" Bucky asked.

"Wherever you want," Natasha said.

Bucky reached back and pulled his hair loose from the knot he'd tied it in when he woke up, letting it fall forward and curtain his face as he scooped coffee beans into the grinder. "Oh, that's subtle," Natasha said. "Very subtle. I always gave you more credit for being subtle than Steve, but apparently I need to revise my opinion."

Bucky didn't respond, just poured the grinds into the coffee machine and started it up. He stayed faced away from her the entire time, and she was so quiet coming up behind him that it made him tense when he felt her hand touch his shoulder. "It was bad," Natasha said. "I get it. I'm not here to try and make you feel that any more than you already do."

She turned him around. Her movements were familiar to him, the way she was guiding him; she was _handling him_ and she had to know it. He didn't meet her eyes. Eventually her hand came up and brushed his hair back, and when he did finally look at her, she was frowning, looking very sad. As sad as he'd ever seen her. There was no expressionless mask on her face, not now. She was letting him see what she was really feeling. "You didn't deserve it," she said. "You didn't. Don't let yourself think otherwise."

Bucky exhaled and looked away again. "I want to do something for you," she said. He raised an eyebrow, glancing back at her. "I'm serious. Don't make that face. I don't care if it seems stupid."

"Coffee's on," he said.

"Great," she replied, dry as a bone, and reached behind him to pour herself a cup. "Go sit on the couch."

He didn't move, and she sighed and pulled him along with her by his hand, arranged him so he was sitting down with his bad leg comfortably propped up, and then squeezed in behind him. Her hands touched his shoulders, palms flat against his scapulae, and then dragged down heavily, along the muscles on either side of his spine. Long, sweeping motions, even pressure. He dropped his head forward.

She didn't say anything to him at all, and her mug of coffee sat steaming, untouched, on the table. She probably rubbed his back for a solid half an hour, starting out general and working down to the specifics, until she had his left arm draped over her own shoulders and was digging her knuckles into the scar tissue around it, all those knots of muscle that never really got to relax. He was breathing heavily, raggedly, and as she finished and worked back to those long slow strokes, he realized tears had started to drip down his nose, landing in uneven spots on the couch.

Her fingers carded briefly through the hair at the nape of his neck, and then she pulled away and reached for her coffee, which had to be lukewarm at best by now. "What kind of beans do you guys use?" she asked casually. "This coffee is really good."

Bucky wiped his eyes. "I don't know," he said, twisting his hair back. "Steve gets them from this place in Brooklyn. I can't remember what it's called."

"You hipsters," Natasha said, rolling her eyes. Bucky smiled at her a little, and she reached over and wiped up a tear lingering on the side of his nose that he must have missed. "I was starting to get hurt feelings that you didn't call me, you know," she said. "I thought we were friends."

"We are friends," Bucky said. "You know why I didn't call you."

Natasha cocked her head. "Yeah," she said. "I do." She picked up her phone, looked at it, and sighed. "I better go before Rogers and Wilson get back. Three's company, four's a crowd. At least it is this early in the morning. I just wanted to see you."

"Thanks," Bucky said. "For stopping."

Natasha gave him her wry half-smile, took his face in both hands, and kissed his forehead. "Feel better," she said.

"You can't give me orders," Bucky said. "I outrank you."

"You sure about that?" Natasha asked. She kissed him again, this time lightly on the mouth, and then got up, finished her mug of coffee, and put it on the kitchen island on her way out.

Once she was gone, Bucky wasn't sure what to do with himself. Part of him wanted to lay down and just -- lose it completely. He hadn't wanted her to see him like this, even less than he'd wanted Pepper to see him, if it was possible. Somehow it was worse because she _knew_. She'd been turned inside out herself, more than once, and she'd seen him get turned inside out too and bounce back from it; somehow made it feel more shameful, that he wasn't bouncing back now.

When Steve and Sam got home about fifteen minutes later, he was eating breakfast, dutifully shoveling eggs and toast into his mouth. "Hey, you made coffee," Sam said, winded. "Thanks, man."

"No problem," said Bucky.

"Natasha came by to see you," Steve said, lifting up the hem of his t-shirt to wipe his face. "Did you get to talk to her?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "She had to go."

"She always has to go somewhere," Steve said. He smiled, shook his head. "I thought you might sleep a while longer, since you were up last night in the middle of the night."

"No," Bucky said. "I'm all right." And looking at Steve standing there and staring at him expectantly, it was so easy to say the next words. "I feel a little bit better today."

It shouldn't have been so easy to lie. But then, it always had been.

+++

Since the press conference, public opinion toward him seemed to be more widely divided than ever before. He figured it said a lot for all the hard work that he, Pepper, David, and the entire PR team had done, that prior to this whole shitstorm, he had widely been regarded as one of _The Good Guys._ His image had been so thoroughly rehabilitated from the metal-armed assassin who had terrorized D.C. that people came up to him on the street to ask for photos. There had been his detractors, of course; there always were. There would always be a subset of the population that wanted him _punished_ , wanted justice served, as if seventy years with Hydra wasn't more than punishment enough.

Now, nobody was quite sure what to think of him. That segment of the population that had wanted him punished was trumpeting their evidence of his inherent evilness to the heavens: _Look what he did, look what he did all over again, we were right all along._ And even those who seemed to believe it wasn't his fault were still wary of him, uneasy and uncertain. He couldn't blame them.

"I'm going crazy," Bucky said. "I can't stand it, sitting around here anymore. I've got to get out of the house. Do you want to get lunch or something?"

Steve turned to look at him. The expression on his face was almost comical, his eyes big and round. "Yeah," he said. "Of course -- you're sure?"

Bucky leveled a stare at him. "I used to come home at night, fall asleep for five or six hours, and then get up and leave again," he said. "I used to work _three_ jobs, Steve, and now all I'm doing is sitting my ass on the couch and sleeping way more than I need to. Yes, I'm sure."

"Okay, okay," Steve said. "Like you'll ever let me forget exactly how many jobs you used to work. Let me go get changed."

Bucky nodded, and felt a sense of relief that he'd done it right, coupled with the dark sick feeling of knowing that there would be cameras waiting for them, that he'd have to let everyone see him all over again. He was at least wearing real pants today, and the swelling had gone down enough that he could fit into shoes again. And -- it'd make Steve happy. It was just something he needed to do.

Steve came back wearing a sweater and jeans, grabbed Bucky's crutches and his coat for him, and brought them over. "Thanks," Bucky said, and let Steve lean in to give him a short, enthusiastic kiss on the mouth.

"Where do you want to go?" Steve asked on the way down. "I guess we should go someplace close, if you're walking. Maybe that Italian place? What's it called? Lucia's, or something?"

"Sure," Bucky said. "Sure, that sounds good." Pasta would be easy to eat. Manageable.

They were standing in the front lobby, about to go out, when Steve said, "Wait, hang on," and took his left glove off so that he could slip his wedding ring into his pocket. Bucky watched him do it; they'd agreed, when they got married, that it'd be better not to wear them in public. At least not until such a time as they decided they wanted it to be public knowledge. Bucky glanced down at his own right hand. He'd forgotten to put his on. It was sitting at home on the bedside table. He'd taken it off to shower. A sudden stab of guilt.

There were cameras outside, but fewer than Bucky would have guessed, and they gave him and Steve an uncharacteristically wide berth. Just as well; he kept his head down, face partially covered by the collar of his coat, as they walked through the cold damp air.

He'd thought maybe once he was outside that he _would_ feel better. He was hoping that he had written a self-fulfilling prophecy, that being around other people would make him feel more human. But instead all he could see was fragility, his own potential to hurt them. He couldn't stop wondering how many people just like these he'd killed and couldn't even remember. He couldn't stop seeing the surprise and fear on their faces when they recognized him. It had been a bad idea.

They got a table right away, and if Steve noticed anything was amiss, he didn't say. Bucky ran his hands through his hair, shaking out a few big wet snowflakes that had settled on him. "There's a new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum," Steve said, unfolding his menu to look at it. "I heard it's pretty good, if you want to go see it with me sometime."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Okay."

Another stab of guilt speared through him, right down into his guts. "Steve," he said, and Steve glanced up, eyebrows raised a little. "You know I don't -- I don't mean to be -- so distant," Bucky managed. "It's just. I can't help it."

Steve's eyebrows folded inward. "I know, Bucky," he said. He ran his hand over the lower half of his face. "I know you're in a lot of pain right now. You'll feel better when you feel better."

At least he hadn't said _you don't owe me anything,_ Bucky thought. That would have been a monstrous lie, maybe the worst of all. The two of them were so embroiled in each other's hearts and souls and messy, bloody innards that they owed each other _everything_ \- at least, Bucky knew that he owed Steve, and would never stop owing Steve, in his own estimation. He owed it to Steve to try, which was most of the reason he was here in the first place. He smiled a little. "I'm gonna get the tortelloni," he said.

"Yeah, that looks good," Steve said. "I was thinking the lasagna."

"Full of surprises, you are," Bucky said, and Steve grinned at him. And Bucky thought: Why the fuck should anyone have to make excuses for him? When had he become this person, this husk, that you had to be so careful with? Why was he surrounded by all these people now who only knew this version of him, this _profoundly_ wrecked version? Even Steve, who would never have backed down for anyone else, was practically walking on fucking eggshells.

The waiter came over then and took their order, which gave Bucky a minute to think of what to say next. "What'd you do with your easel?" he asked.

"It's in the closet somewhere," said Steve. "I didn't do a lot of painting the past few months." He smiled slightly. "My best model was gone."

"Well, you should start again," Bucky said. "I mean, I'm back now and mostly immobile a lot of the time, take advantage while it lasts."

"You're right," Steve said. "I didn't think about it that way. Although I kind of feel like I've missed my window of opportunity."

Bucky shrugged. "I dunno," he said. "You've probably got at least a couple of weeks until I can really walk again. Plenty of time to get something started."

"I suppose," Steve said, and then, fondly, "Why are you on me about this all of a sudden?"

"You like doing it," Bucky said. "You're good at it. I like watching you do it. All signs point to: You should be doing it."

"All right, all right," Steve said. Bucky smiled at him, feeling the corners of his mouth stretch. "This is just like the old days. You pestering me to draw, you know."

"Are you blaming me for seeing you had potential?" Bucky asked. "Jesus, like you didn't pester me."

"Not the same way," Steve accused. "There was no one specific thing, with you. With me, it was always, _Steve, have you been drawing? Did you go down to talk to that grocer about his signs? Looked into taking any art classes_?"

"It was that or _Steve, why do you keep running your face into people's fists_ , and the former I was at least more likely to get a straight answer to," Bucky said. "Besides, there _was_ a specific thing. Girls. You were always asking me about girls. Where was I going, who with, when would I be home. You were like a maiden aunt, I swear."

"I was worried," Steve said. "About your reputation."

Bucky blew out a breath, and Steve laughed. "Can you blame me?" he asked. "God, I was -- it twisted me up inside, I won't lie."

"You were jealous," Bucky said. "Of me, or the girls?" He knew the answer, of course, but he asked anyway. It seemed like the right thing to do, in this conversation.

Steve shook his head. "A little of both," he said. "Well, more of the one than the other. You know."

"I know," Bucky said. "Nothing to be jealous of now, anyway," he said.

"S'pose not," Steve agreed. And the conversation was so normal, so easy to parse, that he almost forgot, until they got back outside and a camera flash went off in his face, to feel sick and worried. Of course it was easier to talk about the past. Things had been hard then in their own way, but the complications, as dire as they'd seemed, were nowhere near the level that they'd been elevated to since then.

He put his hand up in front of his face. "Leave us alone," said Steve, firm and clear, in his Captain America voice. The cameras stopped, and it almost made Bucky laugh, because back in the day, nobody would have listened to Steve like that. At least, nobody that mattered. Nobody except Bucky.

+++

He wanted to see Peggy, he realized; she was the only other person left besides Steve who had known him before all of it -- most of it, anyway -- had happened. He reached for his phone and dialed the number for the nurses' station closest to her room. "Hi," he said, when the nurse picked up. "My name's James Barnes; I'm wondering if Peggy Carter's well enough for visitors today."

"I'm sorry -- I don't --" said the nurse, sounding taken aback.

Bucky interrupted her, impatiently; she must be new, or something. "I'm on her list of allowed visitors," he said. "James Barnes. I'd like to see her if I can."

"I know who you are, James," said the nurse slowly. "I recognize your voice. I'm just -- I'm sorry, but Ms. Carter is no longer under our care."

"She's -- what?" said Bucky.

"I'm really sorry," the nurse said. "I guess you must not have heard. Peggy passed away about a month ago."

Bucky just sat there for a minute, not sure what to say; he felt almost like he'd been physically punched. "Oh," he said eventually. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"It was -- January fourth," the nurse said after a moment, the sound of typing in the background. "I'm so sorry."

"Okay," Bucky said blankly. "Thank you." He hung up and sat back against the couch, sagging like someone had let all the air out of him. He looked over at Steve's easel; a couple of days after they'd had that conversation, Steve had dragged it back out and set it up. He'd started a painting of Bucky, a simple portrait. It was still in its beginning stages; Bucky's face was mostly an indistinct smear of off-white, yellow, and pink, with big dark smudges for its eyes.

He couldn't get up. He didn't know why, he just couldn't summon the strength. It felt like there was an enormous weight on his chest, pinning him there. He was still there when Steve and Sam came home from the V.A., a couple of hours later.

Steve didn't see him at first. He and Sam were talking, quietly. Indistinct words of concern: _Do you think he's going to be okay? I think he's all right enough now that he'll ask for help if he needs it._ They could almost be talking about Bucky, except Bucky knew they weren't.

"Bucky?" Steve called. "You home?" He came around the side of the couch, saw Bucky, and froze. "What is it?" he said. "What's wrong?"

"I wanted to go down and visit Peggy," Bucky said. "I gave them a call. Turns out she's not there anymore."

"Oh," Steve said, all the color draining from his face. "Yeah. I -- it was heart failure. Old age. They said it was as natural as it could be; she went in her sleep." He shook his head, running his hand through his hair. "It was a nice funeral. I was one of the pallbearers."

"Nice of you to tell me _now_ ," Bucky said.

"Well," Steve said quietly, "it didn't come up before."

Something in Bucky snapped. "It didn't come up?" he snarled. "It didn't _come up_? Bullshit. You're making excuses for the fact that you were playing hide-and-seek with the truth. Is it nice, being the person who knows everything and gets to choose what to tell me? Gives you a sense of power? Control, maybe?"

Steve looked shocked for a moment, and then his expression clouded. "I wasn't -- it wasn't about that!" he said, his tone rising to match Bucky's. "I didn't know how much you could handle, with --"

"Fuck you!" Bucky shouted. "You don't get to decide what I can and can't handle! How the fuck did you think withholding that from me was going to help? You think it's better that I get blindsided by it? That's gonna be easier on me?"

"I don't know!" Steve said. "At least now you're better, you're not so --"

"So _what_?" Bucky said. "It doesn't fucking matter if I'm better or not, you don't get to decide -- you _lied_ to me, you piece of shit! What else am I going to find out, what else is there you're not telling me? I _trusted_ you, jesus christ --"

"I never _lied_ to you!" Steve shouted, red in the face. "Don't say that, I didn't _lie_!"

Bucky pushed himself off the couch and stood up, went and got right up in Steve's personal space. "I don't know what fucking universe you're living in," he said, "but all the self-righteousness in the world doesn't change the fact that a lie of omission is still a _god damn_ lie."

"I wasn't lying to you!" Steve yelled, right in Bucky's face, grabbing onto the collar of Bucky's shirt. "I was trying to protect you!"

"You can't protect me that way!" Bucky screamed right back, staring into Steve's huge wild eyes; his pupils were so big, and Bucky imagined he could almost feel how hard Steve's heart was pounding from here, or maybe that was just Bucky's heart. "That's not protecting me, that's leaving me out to swing in the fucking wind, to get fucking slapped in the face!"

"So what?" Steve shouted. "I tell you, and -- and -- you go right back to not wanting to leave the house, sleeping fourteen hours a day, barely eating? You just -- you get so _empty_ , I can't stand it! I can't do that, Bucky, I can't see you that sad, it -- it makes me sick, I _need you_ \--"

"And I need you," Bucky snarled, "to stop trying to _handle me_ and tell me the fucking truth. In sickness and in health, Rogers, or didn't you mean it?"

Steve was totally silent. His mouth hung open, and he just stared at Bucky, the whites showing almost all the way around his eyes. His hand tightened in Bucky's shirt, dragging Bucky, and Bucky instinctively put up his fists. He was ready -- he was --

"Guys!" It was Sam's voice; Bucky had almost forgotten he was there at all. "Guys! Whoa, whoa, come on! Take a step back, take a step back, this is not okay!" He was standing in their periphery, not touching them, which was probably wise, considering that Bucky and Steve could both grind him into a pulp if so provoked. "Take a step back," he repeated, slower. "Take a deep breath."

Steve let go of Bucky abruptly, and Bucky stumbled back, catching himself on his bad leg and swearing. "Listen to me," Sam said. "You need to stop what you're doing and think about what's at stake here."

"She's dead," Bucky said, breathing heavily, yanking his hair back out of his face. "And you lied to me about it. She's not coming back; it's not something you just get to reverse. You don't get a fucking do-over." He ignored the shooting pains in his leg and went rapidly toward the door, pushing out and into the hallway. He went to the elevator, and once the doors closed around him, he sat down on the floor.

"Sir," said JARVIS, "Are you all right?"

Bucky laughed. "Sure," he said. "Sure, JARVIS. Can you -- will you take me up to Pepper's floor?"

"Of course, sir," JARVIS said. "Although I sense that despite your reassurances, you are in some distress. May I be of any assistance?"

"I don't think so," Bucky said. "I don't think it's the kind of thing I can explain. It's -- it doesn't really make sense."

"I have more experience than you may imagine dealing with problems that do not follow logical patterns," JARVIS said. He sounded amused. Bucky managed a hollow croak of a laugh. "Mr. Stark has been a valuable teacher in the many varied nuances of human complexity."

"I'm sure," Bucky said. "I'm sure he has. Thank you, JARVIS."

The elevator dinged open and he got up, went to knock on the door. Pepper answered it, still in work clothes, looking very surprised to see him. "Hello," she said, and then, looking him up and down, "I think you should come in."

He did, and Pepper sat him down on the couch and went and poured him a glass of water. Tony appeared from somewhere, looking like he'd just been asleep, gave Bucky one look, shook his head, and disappeared again. "What happened?" Pepper asked, sitting down next to him, reaching for one of his hands.

"I found out about Peggy," Bucky said.

He watched her face change. "Oh, James," she said, very softly. "He didn't tell you, did he? I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry." She let go of his hand and hugged him instead. "He should have told you," she said into his ear, one of her hands stroking his hair. "It was wrong of him not to."

"It doesn't matter," Bucky said thickly. "It can't be changed now, I can't --"

"I know," Pepper said.

She held onto him for a while, stroking his hair. He felt like a child. "Can I stay here tonight?" he asked, eventually.

"Of course," Pepper said. "Let me go make up one of the guest rooms for you." She started to pull away, and Bucky reached for her hands instead and held onto her.

"Will you just," he said. "Will you stay here for a while."

She stopped pulling away immediately, and nodded. They sat just silently holding onto each other's hands for a while, and then Bucky lay down with his head in her lap, and she started stroking his hair again. Everything had settled to a dull roar, where no one emotion was distinguishable from another anymore. Eventually, he fell asleep.

+++

He woke up stiff, startled; his head was still in Pepper's lap, and she'd fallen asleep too, her chin in her hand where her arm rested on the side of the sofa. He sat up and she blinked awake too, jerking a little. "What time is it?" she said, alarmed. "Oh my god, we've been out here all night. JARVIS?"

"It is five forty-three in the morning, Miss Potts," said JARVIS. "You have two hours and seventeen minutes before you are expected in the office, and no appointments scheduled until nine-thirty, which leads me to conclude there is no need for alarm."

"I hate it when you sound like Tony," Pepper said. She reached over and touching Bucky's face for a moment. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Bucky said tiredly. "Yeah, I'm sorry for -- for invading, and --"

"Don't apologize," Pepper said. "Do you want some coffee? You can stay here as long as you want. I have to go to work, but -- if you want to stay in the apartment, you're welcome here. I have no idea what Tony's going to do all day, but when he's working he won't usually bother you if you're not within eyeshot."

"My stomach still can't handle coffee," said Bucky. "Can I -- can I at least make you breakfast, or something?"

"I usually just have a smoothie and a cup of coffee," Pepper said. She smiled. "We can't all have super-charged metabolisms, you know." She groaned, running her hands over her face, and stood up, walking stiffly toward the kitchen. "I would usually be getting ready for the gym right now, but I honestly don't know if I can handle it after sleeping sitting up all night."

"I'm sorry," Bucky said.

"No, it's really fine," Pepper said. "I'm almost certain I can afford a single cheat day." She glanced over at him, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. "Are you going to be okay? I could cancel my morning appointments."

"Jesus, no," Bucky said; Pepper never cancelled her appointments; she was legendary for how hard she worked, for never taking a day off even when she really, _really_ deserved one. "Don't do that. I'll be fine. I just needed some space to cool down."

"I understand," Pepper said. "And you're always welcome, you know that."

"Thank you," Bucky said. He got up too; his leg protested loudly. He'd slept with it in an awkward position, and he'd jarred the hell out of it the night before. He limped over and stood for a second between Pepper and the door. Saying thank you once didn't seem like enough. "Thank you," he said again.

Pepper nodded. She was feeding kale, beets, and what looked like ginger into a juicer. "You're welcome," she said. "Let me know if there's anything else I can do. Please."

Bucky smiled at her and gave her a little wave, then limped over to the elevator. "Back to yours and Captain Rogers' floor, sir?" JARVIS asked.

"Yeah," Bucky said. The apartment was quiet, when he opened the door, so he just went and sat at the kitchen island with some ice on his leg, which didn't do much to help it feel any better.

Sam came in the front door eventually, in workout clothing, looking exhausted and sweaty. "Hey, man," he said to Bucky. "He's down in the gym. I convinced him he needed to get the hell out of here and go fight something he couldn't break permanently, although after seeing him wail on that punching bag, I'm not sure about that anymore." He went over and poured himself a glass of orange juice, and then sat down across from Bucky.

Bucky didn't say anything, and after a couple of minutes, when Sam had caught his breath, Sam said, "I think it's about time I tell you a few things. And I'm not trying to make you feel guilty, nothing like that. Just, you deserve to know, and in the interests of full disclosure -- he wasn't doing so good, while you were gone. I guess you gotta know that, but -- it was bad, Bucky. Real bad."

Sam shook his head, and Bucky looked across at him. "At first it was just, he wouldn't rest. Everything he had was going into trying to find you. He was running himself into the ground. Wouldn't sleep, hardly eating, he was flying back and forth across the world at the slightest sign of you, and sometimes dragging the rest of us along with him. And then he kind of just -- he cracked, is the best way for me to describe it to you. I think he finally came down from the world's longest damn adrenaline high, and that was when I moved up here."

"Natasha was keeping an eye on him, and she'd come up here and he wouldn't answer the door, and all she'd get from JARVIS was that he was asleep. So she made JARVIS let her in one day and he was just -- asleep, in the middle of the afternoon, and the place was kind of a mess. Not like he was trying to be a slob, just like he didn't have the energy to deal with it." Sam finished his glass of orange juice and tapped it against the table, pointing it toward Bucky. "And she told me, and me -- I've seen that kind of thing before. The giving up. So I came up here, and I got him out of the house. The two of you, man, I gotta tell you, you put on the bravest faces I've ever seen, but you can't fool everybody all the time. He was _miserable._ He was torn up inside. Just ripped to shreds. I think the only thing that kept him going was knowing you were alive; we'd get intel about you, pictures, people knew you were still out there, and that was all that kept him ticking."

Bucky nodded minutely. "He _never_ broke down in front of me," Sam said. "It would have been fine if he did, but he didn't. He just would disappear for a few hours and come back looking like somebody wrung all the water out of him."

"Too proud," Bucky said. "Always was."

"Yeah," Sam sighed. "And anyway -- I was happy to help him. I like helping people. But after Peggy died, I was starting to think I wasn't gonna be enough. And besides that, it's my job, you know? Helping people is my job. And you gotta have a life _outside_ your job, probably as much as all you crazy people that live in this building think otherwise. You and Steve? You're my friends, and I love you guys, but you two have got to let some of this out. Keeping that shit inside? It'll kill you, just like cancer. It'll eat you up inside."

He blew out a breath. "Before I moved up here, I was dating this girl, and about a month after I came up here I got a text from her saying she thought it was better if we called it off, and for a second I was like, _what?!_ and then I realized I'd been so damn busy keeping Steve rolling that I hadn't even texted her in three weeks." He shook his head, meeting Bucky's eyes. "I gotta live my life, Bucky. Being friends with Captain America is amazing, don't get me wrong, but it can't be the only thing I do."

Bucky let out a creaky laugh. "I hate to tell you," he said, "but being friends with Steve was kind of a full-time job before he was anything other than a skinny asshole who put his nose where it didn't belong as often as he could manage." He ran a hand through his hair. "You're right, though. This isn't -- this is us, this isn't you." His mind played over and over the image of Steve laying face down in bed as the sun rose and set and rose again. He could see it so clearly, somehow.

"Like I said," Sam said. "I was happy to keep an eye on him. But now that you're back, this -- the two of you have to figure it out, one way or another. I can only help so much, and I don't belong in the middle of it."

"No," Bucky agreed. "Are you going to move back to D.C.?"

"I don't know yet," Sam said. "It's nice being closer to you guys. But it's nice being a little farther away, too."

Bucky chuckled, and then rolled Sam's words around in his head for a minute. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry you had to see that. You're right. You don't belong in the middle, and I regret putting you there."

"It's okay, man," Sam said. "It's okay. Just promise me that the two of you will at least be honest with each other and stop playing pretend so hard. You know, you both went through some serious shit, and you don't have to come bouncing back from that right away, no matter what you were taught. Some people spend the rest of their lives recovering from shit like that."

Bucky nodded. "I know," he said. But he couldn't forget Steve's words, echoing through his head: _I need you._ And Bucky knew that the version of him Steve needed wasn't this version. The version Steve wanted back was, if not the shiny brass-hued Bucky of _Before_ , at least the version of him that was scabbed over enough to laugh, to go out, to dance with Steve until dawn and sit on the rooftop drinking wine while the sun rose.

"Thanks, Sam," he said, standing up. "Will you tell him, when he gets back, that I'm in bed?"

Sam nodded, and Bucky got up and limped into the bedroom, took off his sweats and t-shirt and lay down. About an hour later, Steve came in, fresh from the shower, and got in bed too. Bucky rolled over and let Steve hold onto him, his nose pressed against Steve's collarbone, Steve's bruised knuckles hot against the nape of his neck, and for a little while neither of them said anything at all, and somehow Bucky managed not to think much at all either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "character death" tag refers to the offscreen death of Peggy Carter.
> 
> Thanks for reading and sticking with me! A new chapter will be up soon. As always, I'm on [tumblr](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com) if you'd like to say hello. :)


	5. the sharpest point

5.

He didn't know what time it was when he woke again, or how long he'd slept. Next to him, Steve was still asleep, his lashes resting peacefully against his cheeks, though Bucky could see he was dark-circled and worn thin. One of Steve's hands rested against Bucky's stomach, and his knuckles were a mess; the scabbing had partially healed while Steve slept, but they were bruised purple, and black in the worst spots. He'd probably broken something. He should have wrapped his hands better.

Steve's eyelids wrinkled and his lashes fluttered. After a moment, he opened his eyes, with that sleepy mouth-smacking noise he often made when he woke up. He reached up and rubbed his face, and then looked at Bucky.

Bucky didn't say anything yet; he didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry," Steve blurted after a few seconds. "You were right, I -- I should have told you."

Bucky blinked at him, surprised. Getting Steve to freely admit he'd been wrong was a feat in itself, and in their entire long history, Steve had rarely been the one to apologize first, even when it was a fight he'd picked. "I'm sorry too," Bucky said. "I shouldn't have flown off the handle like that."

"No, I deserved it," Steve said, the heels of his hands pressed into the hollows of his eyes. "It's not right. Me trying to keep things from you, I mean. I knew it wasn't. I just told myself that it would be better that way. I don't know what I was expecting to happen."

"Sam said to me," Bucky said, and then paused for a moment when Steve looked at him in something like terror. "Sam said," he continued, "that you -- it was hard for you when I was gone. I knew it must have been, but..."

Steve was silent for a long span, maybe a solid couple of minutes. Bucky watched his face, his profile illuminated by light shining in through the curtains. "It was kind of like when I first woke up," Steve said, "and I realized that everything -- _everything_ \-- I knew was gone. They wanted me to do so much, and I _couldn't_ sometimes. It was like my brain was stuck on a channel just playing static, or something."

"You know I never wanted to leave you," Bucky said.

"I know," Steve said. "Nobody ever _wants_ to. It's just what happens." He shook his head. "When," he said, and then, heavily, like it was sucking all the breath out of him to say it, "when Peggy died, I couldn't stop thinking about -- she had to live her life, you know, after I came along and made my place in it, and. And she did _so well_ and here I was just, I couldn't, I couldn't even be awake sometimes, I missed you so much, and I should have." He took a deep shuddery breath. "I should have been there for her more. I should have tried to make it up to her, but all I could think about was I wanted you back so bad, and it was so unfair that, that -- that I --"

He stopped talking abruptly, snapping his mouth shut, and a couple of tears spilled out of the corners of his eyes. He wiped them away hastily, but he had to know there was no way Bucky had missed them. "I'll never know what it was like, for her," he said. "I just hope to god it wasn't half as bad as this has been. I don't know how she did it. I don't know how she was that strong, Buck. I just don't."

Bucky shifted. He wasn't sure what to say, and there was that same irrational twinge of jealousy, a stubborn ember that flared up every time he was reminded of what could have been between Steve and Peggy. "She loved you," he said eventually. "I know that much. And it's never been easy, I know that much too, but it's worth it. I imagine that's how she felt."

"Nothing is easy, with me," Steve said, laughing, and sniffling a little, almost convulsively. "I just -- I just wish for once, something would be --"

"Shut up," Bucky said abruptly. "I don't want it easy, Steve. I don't want that because that would mean changing you, and I don't want easy. I've never wanted easy. I just want you."

Steve looked at Bucky, watery-eyed and swollen-nosed. "You look like Rudolph the fucking red-nosed reindeer when you cry," Bucky said. "Stop trying to be so perfect. Nobody wants you to be perfect. _I_ don't want you to be perfect. I never loved you because you were perfect. I never loved you because of anything else anyone thought you were supposed to be, I loved you because I knew exactly who you were."

Steve laughed again. "Listen to you," he said. "Take a page from your own lesson book, why don't you."

Bucky sighed. "Christ, that's a lost cause," he said. "I don't think anybody's under that particular illusion anymore."

"If people knew--" Steve started.

"That's a two-edged sword," Bucky said; he knew where Steve was going with it. Steve persisted in believing Bucky was wonderful, and wouldn't suffer anyone who had any opinion to the contrary, Bucky included. Bucky wondered if he'd ever succeed in making Steve realize how profoundly selfish it had all been, in his estimation. Maybe not. Maybe it was best that way.

Steve was quiet. His eyes started to lose their sheen, and eventually he braced himself on one elbow and leaned down to give Bucky a kiss. This went on for a while; they traded kisses back and forth, and that -- well, that _did_ feel easy, sort of. Familiar. But -- Steve's hand slid down Bucky's chest, and his fingers crept underneath the waistband of Bucky's underwear, and Bucky reached down and circled his fingers around Steve's wrist to pull them back out until Steve's hand was resting on his belly instead.

He didn't know what it was. No, that wasn't exactly right; he knew what it was, it just didn't make much sense. It wasn't exactly what Natasha had said. He knew that he didn't _deserve_ to feel bad. It was just that he couldn't make himself believe fully that he deserved to feel good, either.

He knew it would work. He knew that if he let Steve, he could get hard, that it would be good, he'd get off. Maybe he would feel better afterward. But he didn't _want_ to. It felt somehow dishonest, and of all the things that could possibly pollute what he had with Steve, he sure as hell wasn't going to let that be the one. Sex had _always_ , always worked between them, even when everything else had gone to shit. And to sacrifice that now --

Steve was frowning at him, looking kind of hurt. It made sense; for any other couple, maybe this would have been normal, but for Steve and Bucky, it was a hell of a dry spell, and Bucky couldn't remember a time before this latest disappearance when he'd turned Steve down because of anything other than inconvenient circumstances. "It's not you," Bucky blurted. "It's not, I swear, just -- I can't right now."

The frown deepened for a minute, and then Steve's face relaxed. He stroked his thumb over Bucky's hipbone, and didn't press it. Bucky knew that Steve knew how hard it could be for Bucky to say no, and he wasn't going to push.

"Do you remember," Steve said eventually, "when we talked about -- how I couldn't lose you again?"

"Of course I remember," Bucky said. "I know. I _know._ " And god, how he wished he could promise that to Steve. But he couldn't. Fate and circumstance had taught him exactly that, another spear of guilt that spiraled downward into his gut and took up residence there. "I don't want to," he said instead, even though he knew he was repeating himself. "I never wanted to."

"It just makes you wonder," Steve said tiredly. "What am I doing, if I can't even protect the things that matter most?"

"I don't know," Bucky said. He paused, kissed Steve's mouth, his chin, the point of his cheekbone. "The best you can, just like the rest of us, I guess."

He knew when he said it that it wouldn't be much comfort to Steve. Steve had never been content to be just as good as every other poor, ordinary soul walking the planet. He'd always viscerally _wanted_ to be better. But it was the only thing that Bucky could think of to say. It was going to have to be good enough.

+++

Sam moved out of the tower, but not back to D.C.; it turned out that Clint owned a building in Brooklyn, and Sam moved in there and took on a sort of second -- third? -- job as caretaker. "It doesn't take much, I gotta tell you," Sam said. "Folks mostly keep to themselves. I think it just makes 'em feel better knowing somebody's there to take care of stuff."

He'd called Steve and Bucky over to help him move some furniture out of the basement. It made sense, when Bucky got a look at all of the junk; it would probably have taken a whole crew of guys working their asses off to move it otherwise, but Steve and Bucky barely broke a sweat. Besides, it was good to be getting out of the house.

Bucky's leg was pretty much healed now, except for the occasional twinge when he landed on it harder than he intended, and the patch of his leg hair they’d shaved off which hadn't quite grown back yet. But the longer Bucky was back, the more complicated things had gotten. There was talk of a trial now -- Bucky wasn't really involved in it, it was a lot of stuff that legal took care of and occasionally called or e-mailed Bucky to update him on, but even getting the e-mails was enough to send a cold shiver down his spine. He'd avoided it the first time, but, well, that had been the first time. And people were rarely as forgiving the second time around.

Bucky didn't care if they wanted to fine him. Shit, he'd give them all his money to pay for the damages he'd unwillingly caused. He just didn't know if he could handle having to stand up in front of judge, jury, and executioner and have it all shoved back in his face. All of those people, watching him, and half of them just wanting him to _pay_ for what he'd done, not caring if he'd meant it or not.

He and Steve had talked about this a few times. They had a contingency plan, if at any point either of them ended up incontrovertibly on the wrong side of the law. And Bucky knew they'd both survive it, that they could run forever if they had to. The thing was, he didn't want to have to.

Perhaps the worst of it was that he _had_ started to remember. As his body recovered, so, stubbornly, did his mind. Like he wasn't already chock full of memories he didn't want, suddenly there were more. They were at once completely similar to and totally unlike the memories he had from Hydra: All of the atrocity, and none of the accompanying emotion. As if someone had pushed the mute button on everything that had made him human, like Hydra had wished they could all along. Standing on an overlook, watching a factory burn, watching people run from the smoldering ruin -- a woman, dragging a man, crying, his body charred black, her face covered in soot. She was crying, wailing. And he had felt -- he had felt nothing.

There was no rhyme or reason to the way that they came back to him, or at what time. Sometimes it was in dreams, and that was fairly familiar. That way at least it was easier to hide the evidence. He could get out of bed and go stand in the kitchen or the bathroom until he felt better. Steve usually woke up, but knew better than to ask, unless Bucky volunteered any information, which he never did. Bucky had told Steve enough of these stories. After a certain point, it just became repetitive. Useless.

When he was awake, it was harder. It probably said something very dire about the state of his life, that people were used to watching him zone out. Something would trigger it -- the sound of a motorcycle backfiring outside, or a woman shouting at a taxi driver. It didn't matter what it was, sometimes the trigger was totally unrelated to the content of the memory. But Bucky just got _sucked_ inexorably down into it, and he couldn't leave until he'd remembered it. It was inconvenient, especially when you were in public. The paparazzi liked to take photos of him like that, blank-faced, usually with Steve's hand on his shoulder, Steve staring expectantly into his eyes. It must have sold a lot of newspapers for them. At least someone was benefiting from it.

He didn't want the memories, but he didn't seem to have a choice. So he just did what he always did, and always had done, as far as he could remember: He lived with it.

+++

"Hey," said Natasha, tinny through the phone. The sound of cars honking in the background. "Are you busy?"

Bucky felt his eyebrows go up. "No," he said. "Why?"

"Good," Natasha said. "I'm outside the tower with Clint. I think the two of you should talk. We're coming up. We're getting in the elevator. See you in a minute. Put some pants on."

Bucky scrambled off the couch and went to the bedroom, put on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, just in time to come back out into the living room and hear JARVIS say, "Sir? Agents Romanoff and Barton are outside."

"I got it, I got it," Bucky said, jogging over to get the door.

Natasha gave him a skeptical look and crowded past him, with Clint right behind her. "You need a haircut," she said, apparently in greeting.

"Hi," Clint said. "She was right about the pants, wasn't she?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Hi."

"She always is," Clint said. "It's uncanny." He put his hands in his pockets and started to walk around the apartment; Bucky realized he didn't know if Clint had actually ever been up here before. About halfway through, Clint noticed Steve's painting sitting ninety-percent finished on the easel and went right over to it like he was being sucked in. Bucky smiled to himself. He'd seen that happen before.

"So what's up?" Bucky said to Natasha.

She turned away from where she was watching Clint and looked at him instead. She looked like a knockout today, wearing a knee-length black dress, boots, and a leather jacket, her hair spilling loose around her shoulders. After a moment she reached up and took Bucky's chin in her hand, holding him still and staring hard into his eyes. "You know, last time I was here I didn't really expect that to be the only time I saw you for another month and a half," she said.

Bucky didn't have any excuses that would work on her, so he just shrugged. Her eyelids flickered, and she smacked him lightly on the cheek. She was mad at him. "I have to go run an errand," she said. "I'll be gone an hour or two. You two should talk. I'm not playing this game with you all over again, Barnes."

Bucky looked away, over at Clint's back where he was still looking at the painting. The likeness was really good -- maybe more so because Steve had managed to capture the look that Bucky got when he was about to go away. A sort of sense of regretful resignation. "You two should talk," Natasha said again. She let go of him and turned practically on her heel, walking out the door without saying anything else.

"She's always like that," Clint said after she was gone. "Usually I just go with it. She almost always turns out to be right."

"I'm learning that more and more," Bucky said. "You want -- coffee? Beer? Wine? Whiskey? Water? Orange juice?"

Clint glanced at his watch. "Sure, I'll take a beer," he said. "Shit, this painting is really good. I should have gone to that show Rogers had at Christmas last year."

"You should have," Bucky agreed, getting Clint a beer and walking over to hand it to him. "That one's almost done. He's been working on it a while."

"I can tell," Clint said. "He really got you." He cracked open the beer, and laughed. "I'd say I'd like to see him do one of me, but I'm almost afraid how it'd turn out."

Bucky could have told Clint he wouldn't have to worry. It wasn't exactly that Steve saw the best in people, but he'd never paint somebody he didn't respect. "Sam's doing a good job at the building?" he asked eventually, slightly awkward.

"Oh yeah, Sam's doing great," Clint said. "He's a great guy." Apropos of nothing, apparently, he added, "You speak any sign language?"

Bucky signed _sheep fucker_ at him, and Clint cracked up for a second. "Okay, what else?" he said.

"Nothing," Bucky said. "That's it. That's literally all. Why?"

"Jesus christ," Clint said. "You know, that's how I know Hydra was fucked in the head: they taught you how to say _sheep fucker_ and nothing else. Like, what tactical purpose could that even possibly serve? Okay, come on, I want to show you some stuff. It's good for talking shit about Tony behind his back. JARVIS never translates it. We have a pact."

They went over to the kitchen island and Clint taught Bucky a bunch of basic stuff, for about forty-five minutes. Bucky picked it up quickly; the combination of physical action and mental-verbal connection was a combination he was particularly good with. Plus, it was entertaining -- you had to emote more with sign language, and Clint had a whole repertoire of facial expressions Bucky had never seen him use before. It wasn't until Clint said, "So, what was it like?" that Bucky realized Clint had, in his own way, been warming Bucky up for this.

Bucky shrugged. "What was it like for _you_?" he asked.

"Well," Clint said. "I've discovered it's actually really hard trying to describe being mind controlled. I guess it was like -- I knew what _I_ wanted to do, but it never mattered, because what _Loki_ wanted me to do was way more important."

Bucky nodded. "I was still in there," Clint continued. "It was just that the part that was _me_ was like -- I dunno. It was a lot quieter, whenever what I wanted disagreed with what he wanted. I could still do all the normal stuff, and even the thought patterns were mine, it was just they were all being steered by him."

"I wasn't," Bucky said. "I wasn't there." He looked down at his hands for a second. "I know what that's like, with -- with Hydra, it was like that, sort of. I had a sort of conception of what was right and wrong, but it just started to not matter what _I_ thought was right and wrong, it was irrelevant."

He paused. "This wasn't like that," he said. "This was -- there was no _me_ wanting anything, there was just whatever that thing wanted, whatever it was. It was like I didn't have any will of my own. I didn't want anything, I just did whatever it needed me to do. And all the normal things you would feel, you know, they're just missing. When I remember stuff, it's just like watching someone else, except I know I was there, I just don't remember _feeling_ anything about it. And it was. It was the kind of stuff you would definitely feel something about."

Clint nodded slowly. He was quiet, his gaze going past Bucky for a minute, his eyebrows furrowing. "I mean," he said. "I can't say I understand, 'cause I don't. Half the time I feel like I kind of can't even remember what it really _did_ feel like. The whole idea of not being in control of what you do is so foreign. But -- that sucks. That's fucking terrible. It was bad enough knowing that I didn't want to do the stuff and he made me do it anyway. I can only imagine what it must be like not even knowing you didn't want to do it."

"That's it," Bucky said. "There was no _wanting_ on my behalf." He shook his head, slanting his own gaze off to the side. "So I _can't_ even say I didn't want to do it."

"You didn't, though," Clint said. "You know you didn't, right."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "I know I would never have done it if that thing didn't make me. It doesn't make me feel any better." He sighed. "You want another beer?"

"Sure," Clint said, passing the empty over. Bucky tossed it into the recycling and got another out of the fridge, lobbed it over to him. "What do you think it's gonna take for you to feel better?" he asked.

"Hell if I know," Bucky said, sitting back down. "Time, I guess. I still don't remember a lot of it. I don't _want_ to, but they come back anyway."

Clint nodded, opening the beer, and then swearing as it foamed over. Bucky handed him a dishrag. "You know Nat just misses you, right?" he asked.

"Sure," Bucky said.

"She does," Clint says. "She cares. She doesn't know how to make it better either but she's gotta try or else she won't feel right about it."

"Yeah, I get that," Bucky said. "But I can't make any promises. I can't just -- be better because everybody wants me to. I've tried that and it just ends up bad."

Clint nodded, sliding the dishrag back over to Bucky. "Well, I don't know what else to say," he said. "It sucks."

"It sucks," Bucky agreed.

"And she was right," said Clint. "You definitely need a haircut, dude."

+++

He wasn't asleep when it happened; that probably would have been easier, but easier would have been too -- too fair, or something. No, he was wide awake. It was about one in the morning, and Steve had already gone to bed, but Bucky, feeling restless and jittery, couldn't sleep. There were a lot of things that could have caused the insomnia, but at the top of the list was an e-mail Bucky had gotten from his lawyer around dinnertime that had said -- among other things -- _You should prepare yourself in the event that a subpoena is issued._

He was flipping through channels on the TV, unable to settle on anything. A lot of it was news, which did nothing to calm Bucky's nerves. It all seemed to be bad news, with these little fragments inserted, human-interest stories that seemed almost banal in how benign they were. Like a champagne toast on a sinking ship.

Eventually he gave up and turned the TV off, sighing and resting his head against the back of the couch. There were no lights on in the apartment, and without the TV's glow, the city outside seemed much brighter, almost unreal. He got up and cracked one of the windows open so he could hear the sounds of the city, even though it wasn't really warm enough yet to have a window open.

He stood and listened to it for a minute. The sound of cars stopping and going, taxis honking, even the faint din of people laughing and talking from far below. An ambulance raced by, and a firetruck, sirens blaring --

\-- there had been a car accident. Or, to be more accurate, he had caused a car accident. He had been the one driving the car. He had driven it straight into the front of a building, over the sidewalks, up the steps, and everything. He was getting out of the car, surveying the damage. Alarms were going off, people were screaming, and he'd shattered a lot of the glass windows. They were tempered glass, designed to fall into a thousand tiny pieces so they wouldn't hurt anyone. Little chunks of it, everywhere, crunching under his feet.

He looked into the building. Everyone seemed to have run in the other direction, which was just as well, because then there would be nobody there to impede his progress. He glanced down, and saw a hand, fingers opening and closing feebly, underneath the car.

He crouched down. Mangled beneath the car's undercarriage and wheels was the body of a man wearing a business suit. Below the shoulders, the body had been more or less completely destroyed; the legs lay askew, split open like you'd split open a piece of meat, like someone was trying to portion him out. Bone glistened nearly black with blood. Most of the torso was so decimated that you couldn't really tell what had been what, the organs all crushed beyond recognizability. He could see the heart, somewhere in the wreck of the man's chest, caged in by broken ribs, feebly pumping, as if it could somehow still keep the body alive.

The wheel of the car had rolled over the man's shoulder and upper chest. When Bucky looked at him, he stared back, his eyes big and round. His neck, head, and one of his arms had been untouched by the car, and the pressure of the wheel must have been keeping all the blood in, keeping him alive and conscious. Blood dribbled from his mouth, which opened and closed without a sound other than the gaspy wheezing as he tried to draw breath and couldn't. He might have been crying; it was hard to say whether the shine of moisture on his face was that, or sweat.

His mouth kept moving, and Bucky frowned, trying to discern what he was saying. _Help me_ , the man's lips shaped. _Help, help._ Bucky looked between the man's face and the ruin of his body under the car. Then he straightened up and walked into the building.

He came back to himself with the cool spring air whipping in his face. The sirens had long passed, and were far enough away now that he couldn't hear them anymore. _Help, help_ , he thought. His stomach rolled, hard.

He stumbled into the bathroom, uncoordinated; his chest was so tight he could hardly breathe, and his vision was swimming. He went to his knees in front of the toilet, the pit of his stomach heaving violently, but he found he couldn't even throw up, just cough raggedly, so hard that it brought tears to his eyes. The picture was so clear in his mind, all the nuances he hadn't been able to parse at the time or hadn't cared about. The terror on the man's face, the way his expression changed to despair when Bucky looked between his head and his body.

Bucky choked, resting his forehead forward against the cool seat of the toilet. His breath was harsh, audible, _hh-hh-hh_ , but it didn't seem to be doing any good; his heart was beating so hard he thought he might pass out, and the few tears that the coughing had brought to his eyes had turned to a torrent, a flood, pouring down his face. He didn't feel capable of doing anything, in that moment. It was almost like he'd reached his state of equilibrium here, gasping and choking on the bathroom floor.

The sound of footsteps made him jerk his head up. Steve came into the bathroom and immediately sat down on the floor right next to him, even though he was still rubbing sleep out of his eyes. "Bucky," he said, putting his hand on Bucky's back, moving it in small circles. Bucky wanted to tell him _don't touch me, I don't want you touching me_ , but he couldn't even say that. "Buck, Buck -- what is it? What is it?"

Bucky shook his head, reaching up with one shaky hand and wiping his face. "I can't help if I don't know what's wrong," Steve said.

For a minute, Bucky couldn't get enough breath to say anything, and Steve just watched him as he struggled to make any words come out. And when he finally could speak, he hated how his voice sounded -- pitchy and weak, almost whiny. "I don't want to tell you," he said.

"Please, Bucky," Steve said quietly. "I just want to help."

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut and made a noise that was neither a laugh nor a sob, but some horrible thing in between. "I crashed a car into a bank," he said. Once he'd started, the rest of it came out too fast, an avalanche of words. "I ran over this guy. He was -- his body got, it was all fucked up, like, like you smashed a melon or something, but his. The pressure from the tire must have been keeping him a-alive or something, he was -- he was trying to ask me to help him and I just, I looked at him, and then I walked right past him, into the building, and I didn't -- I didn't even recognize that he was scared, I just didn't _care_."

Steve didn't say anything, and when Bucky managed to look at him, he was white as a sheet, his eyes big and his mouth tight. "It was like the -- the war," Bucky eked out, "It was like the war, but it was worse, 'cause -- I just couldn't even feel sorry for him, and it was me that did it."

Maybe it was the messiness of it that got to him; the Winter Soldier was a killer, sure, but the death he brought had usually been swift and silent, and when it wasn't either of those, it had at least been for a purpose. He'd never been _casual_ about it, never been the sort to just haphazardly leave civilian collateral damage when it could be avoided. It wasn't how he operated, that sort of callousness, and -- and he knew that he'd always _felt_ it. Part of why they had wiped him, probably, was the very human tendency toward regret, when the mission was over.

His mind ran through instances of violence, like you would play a flipbook. It wasn't hard to call them up, as intimately interwoven in his life as the act of killing was, and he hated that he couldn't identify what it was about this that made it so different. But he knew it _was_ different, he knew from the look on Steve's face. Steve had seen him kill, and he'd never reacted this way before. Steve hated the idea of killing but he could stomach it when it was for a reason, and Bucky knew that some part of Steve had _liked_ seeing Bucky kill for him. But not now.

"Say something," Bucky begged.

"I don't know what to say," Steve said, the muscle at the corner of his jaw twitching when he closed his mouth again.

"You _made me tell you,_ " Bucky said. "You asked me to, what did you expect? I can't -- I can't --"

"I know!" Steve said. "I know, I --" He cut himself off, shaking his head, and backed off, running a hand through his hair. "Let me just -- let me get you some water, okay, Buck? I'll be right back."

Bucky put his face in his hands and just _cried,_ subsiding into misery again, like he hadn't in -- probably forever. Shame welled back up inside him, but he was already so full of it that it was like a drop in the ocean, just a ripple in a very large pond.

Steve came back and sat down next to him again; when Bucky managed to look at him, he'd recovered a little from the shock and wasn't as pale as he had been. "Dammit," Steve said, looking at the glass in his hand for a second and then setting it aside, reaching for Bucky's knee and turning him toward Steve. "I'm -- shit, Bucky, I don't know what to say. I just don't know what to say."

Steve maneuvered Bucky's limbs gently, almost like he was a doll, and Bucky just sort of collapsed against him, falling into Steve’s arms. It was the only place in his life that made sense right now, and even that was ironic in its own way, because it never would really have worked this way, he never would have fit like this, before all of this had happened. Even then, though, Steve had always been the stronger of the two of them. "It's okay," Steve said, cupping the back of Bucky's head, holding him in place. "It's gonna be okay, Buck. It is."

It wasn't, it couldn't. At least it felt that way. Steve let go of him, after a while, and settled him back. "Drink this," he said, offering Bucky the glass of water. "You'll feel better."

Bucky remembered Steve's forehead under his hand, sweaty and burning with fever. Steve's red-rimmed eyes and his chapped, spit-flecked lips. "You shouldn't even _be_ here," Steve had wheezed out. "Shouldn't you be at work?" and Bucky had just said, "Shut up and drink the water, Steven," because god knew Steve's ma wasn't around to take care of him anymore when he got like this, and the winter had been a bad one, long and cold. He'd stayed up all night watching Steve, feeding Steve water and broth when Steve was awake, helping him to the bathroom, putting damp rags on his forehead. And the fever had broken, sometime the next morning, and Steve had felt better.

In that other life, it had been one of the worst moments of terror Bucky had ever known, staring at the rise and fall of Steve's chest all night, hoping and praying it wouldn't stop. But compared to this, it was so simple, so easy. A sickness like that, you could get better from. Fevers ran their course. This -- this was something else entirely.

He drank the water anyway, and Steve's hand did come down on his forehead, checking his temperature, brushing his hair out of his face. "I don't want you to be taking care of me," Bucky said, miserable, nonsensical. "It's supposed to be the other way around."

"Bucky, come on," Steve said, with the slightest note of irritation in his voice that he always got, one that made Bucky laugh, even if the laugh had an edge of hysteria. "It's not like that anymore. We take care of each other. Now come on, let's go back to bed."

"Okay," Bucky said. He let Steve pull him up and take him to bed. Steve stayed watching him, propped up on his elbow, and Bucky was -- emptied out, exhausted, hollow. He fell asleep.

+++

The sun rose the next morning. He woke wrapped tight in Steve's arms, being held like he was something precious Steve couldn't bear to let go of, with Steve's face pressed into his hair. Maybe he felt better, but -- better compared to what?

The day passed in a kind of haze. There was this conversation with Steve where Steve didn't quite say that he was sorry, but did say that he wished he'd reacted differently. That he hated thinking of Bucky having to remember all this stuff, that he hated Bucky had been forced to do it. Bucky almost wanted to laugh: If Steve hated it, how did he think Bucky felt?

He would have been afraid to go to sleep, but it hadn't happened while he was asleep. So instead he was just _afraid_. It could be anything, anything at all, that would bring up the next memory. The feeling was almost one of being paralyzed. Any stimulus at all could suddenly turn into a nightmare.

He didn't sleep for a couple of days, and Steve hovered around him looking worried, fraying at the edges with the palpable sense of anxiety that pervaded their entire apartment. He kept asking, "What can I do?" and Bucky didn't know how to tell him that he couldn't do anything; Steve had never been one to accept that as an answer, and he did a poor job of it even now.

He dragged Bucky out, made Bucky go running with him, get coffee. In a way it was like deja vu -- these had been the simple and easily managed tasks of daily human life that they had started out with back when Bucky barely felt human at all. Bucky didn't know if it made him feel better. If anything, it probably only made the feeling worse. Hypervigilance, it was called. It would have made sense, as exhausted as he was, that it would all run together, minutes and hours blurring into a stream of sensation, but instead Bucky couldn't stop _noticing_ everything, and it taxed him to such a degree that he could hardly hold a conversation.

Eventually the strain became untenable. He slept for eighteen hours, got up, ate almost everything in the fridge, and fell asleep again in the shower, waking up slumped in the tub with lukewarm water running into his open mouth and Steve standing over him, looking terrified, running his hands through his own hair. When he went back to bed, he _couldn't_ sleep, and it took an hour of Steve just touching him in the most benign ways -- scratching his blunt fingernails up and down Bucky's back, rubbing his thumb against Bucky's palm, untangling Bucky's wet hair -- for him to drift off.

"I'm worried about you," Steve said, the next day, quiet. As if Bucky hadn't known that. But he knew he had to fucking _get it together_ ; he couldn't keep doing this to Steve.

He had practice with that. He could do it. He knew he could.

+++

He held himself together, some kind of shaky truce between his brain and his body, for about a week and a half. Long enough for Steve to take it as a sign of improvement. And -- Steve's life _was_ going on. "Do you remember Dr. Leitman?" he asked Bucky on Tuesday afternoon. He was checking his e-mail as Bucky sat and read the same page of his book over and over again.

"Of course," Bucky said, secretly relieved. Talking was easier. "Why?"

"He asked me if I'd be interested in doing another lecture. I guess there's some kind of academic conference happening." Steve scratched his cheek, glancing up at Bucky.

"You did it once before and it went fine," Bucky said. "What's the hangup?"

"It's for a queer theories course," Steve said. "I guess I just -- I don't know, I don't know if I'd be the right person to talk about that kind of thing."

Bucky shut his book, raised an eyebrow at Steve. "I’d say they picked exactly the right guy, because you’ve sure got plenty of queer theories,” he said, and then, more seriously, “You're married to me. I don't know if you've noticed, but I happen to be a man. I think that qualifies you."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Steve said. "I don't know, I suppose I just didn't ever think of it that way. I don't know how to say it; I just know there's a lot of people out there, and for them, it's this big, important part of their identity, and I don't want to seem like I'm piggybacking on that."

Bucky shrugged. "I know what you mean," he said, "but the fact of the matter is that both of us are, unless I'm very sorely mistaken, about as queer as a pair of three-dollar bills, so I don't think you need to worry about undeservedly usurping anything."

The look Steve gave him seemed almost surprised. "You always liked women a lot," he said.

"Sure," Bucky said. "I did. I always liked men, too, you know."

Steve blinked at him, and Bucky thought, _come on, Steve, really?_ "You never said anything about that," he said to Bucky.

"Neither did you," Bucky said. "Neither did -- most people, really. It wasn't really something we talked about, was it." He sat up a little. "I think you should do it. Throw around your celebrity status for something meaningful. I'm sure you have plenty to say on the subject if you give it some thought."

Steve chuckled and shook his head. 'My celebrity status," he said. "I don't know if it's ever not gonna be weird hearing that."

"Paparazzi follow you in the street," Bucky said.

"I know," Steve said. "It's just surreal. You know it is."

Bucky smiled at him slightly. "I know," he said.

"Okay," Steve said, typing on his computer. "I'll tell him I'll do it." He stretched, neck cracking, arms above his head, and then relaxed, setting the laptop on the coffee table. "Now I just have to figure out what to say."

+++

If Bucky had thought that the place had been packed last time Steve had spoken, it was twice as packed this time. There were people lined up outside the auditorium, all the way out into the parking lot, and their driver said, "You know what, I'm going to go around--" and found somewhere a little less crowded to drop them off.

Bucky looked over at Steve, who looked as stunned as Bucky felt, but who shook it off quickly, thanking the driver and sort of -- well, he didn't quite put his arm around Bucky, but he held it up, like he was shielding Bucky, protecting him somehow, at they got out of the car. Steve didn't have a goddamn thing to be nervous about; the lecture that he'd put together, with Bucky's input, and even a little help from David, was fantastic. Not only did it dig pretty deep into the dichotomy of Steve's constructed identity as Captain America and his lived identity as Steve Rogers, it went into a whole lot of other stuff too: The hypermasculine ideal of the superhero, for one, and also the changing ways that queer identities had been communicated and discussed throughout Steve's -- and Captain America's -- lifetime.

It was good. Steve was going to be great, like he had been before. Bucky was there, because how could he not be? Natasha was out of country, but Sam was coming too, as soon as he got off work. There were places for both of them reserved right in the front row, and Bucky had resolved that he'd actually sit in the audience this time and watch like a normal person, instead of standing offstage as he had last time.

Dr. Leitman was thrilled to see Steve, even if he didn't quite seem to know how to address Bucky's situation. Bucky couldn't blame him. Nobody knew whether to bring it up or not, nobody knew if it was all right to ask Bucky how he was doing, and nobody was going around telling Bucky he looked great, because he didn't. Bucky just tried to be as unobtrusive as he could, and to stay out of everybody's way. Eventually they were getting Steve mic'd up and ready to go, and Bucky said, "Hey, I'm going to sit down, okay?"

"All right," Steve said, leaning over from where someone was clipping a mic to his tie and kissing Bucky sort of off-center on the cheek.

"You're going to be great," Bucky said, and Steve's hand reached out to grab onto one of his for a second, squeezing, before letting go again. By the time he got out into the auditorium, it turned out Sam had arrived, and was sitting in his reserved seat, right next to Bucky's. He waved.

Bucky sat down next to him, unbuttoning his suit jacket. "You get here all right?" he asked.

Sam snorted. "It was a damn madhouse," he said, "but yeah, I made it. Glad I could be here."

"Yeah, I am too," Bucky said. "This is going to be really good, he put a lot of work into it."

"He puts a lot of work into everything," Sam said, smiling lopsidedly, and then the auditorium doors opened up and a mass of people flooded in, and Bucky got distracted watching the ushers help everyone find their seats.

"Lot of people," Sam said, offhanded in a way Bucky could tell wasn't really offhanded at all.

"Yeah," Bucky agreed. "Well, he deserves it."

Sam gave him a look he couldn't read, and then their row started to fill up, with a series of people Bucky assumed were all important, all of whom wanted to introduce themselves and smile at him. So he introduced himself and smiled back, and before he had a chance to say anything else, the lights went down and Dr. Leitman came out to introduce Steve.

It must have been good. There was this sort of hushed, reverent silence that only ever happened when people knew somebody was saying something really worthwhile. And Bucky could _hear_ Steve's voice, that was the weird thing, but he couldn't process anything that Steve was saying. All he could pay attention to was the people who kept turning to look at _him_ instead of Steve. It got worse as time slipped by -- there was this one man, a couple of rows back and to the side, who was looking at Bucky _every time_ that Bucky turned to look in his direction.

He didn't realize what was happening until he couldn't breathe. Just -- they kept looking at _him_ , and they should be looking at _Steve_ instead. It felt like he was a zoo animal, prowling behind the bars while kids stared and screamed at him. Or worse, it felt like being put on display, put through his paces for the judgment of handlers and visiting dignitaries. _You can see he's an impressive specimen,_ except he wasn't impressive now. He was -- pathetic, worthy of pity, or maybe disgusting, revolting even -- maybe they could see through him, through this shell that he was wearing of being a real person, see all the things he'd done, see his hands covered in blood and him not giving a shit, not caring about anything.

Sam's hand touched his shoulder, and Bucky said, "Excuse me," choked, and stumbled out of his seat, heading toward the nearest emergency exit and pushing through it blindly. This place was like a maze, there were so many doors. He had to pick the right, one, or --

No, it didn't matter. He just needed to find someplace to -- to what? To clear his head? To catch his breath? To get away from everyone staring at him? He pushed on a door. It was locked. He put his shoulder into it, and the lock gave way and the door opened. It was just an empty classroom, a much smaller lecture hall than the one Steve was giving his speech in. Bucky went inside and managed to close the door behind him and put a chair against it before his knees gave out and he slumped to the floor.

After a few seconds, the door rattled, and then opened again, pushing the chair aside, and Bucky looked up in terror, but it was just Sam. Sam didn't say anything. He came over, sat down next to Bucky, and watched him for a minute.

"Bucky?" he said eventually. "I think you're having a panic attack. Is it okay if I stay with you?"

Bucky nodded, his vision swimming, his heart pounding. He was panting through his mouth now and couldn't get enough of a handle on himself to even draw a full breath. "Is it okay if I put my hand on your shoulder?" Sam asked.

Bucky nodded again, and Sam's hand came to rest on his right shoulder, a steady weight. "I'm right here with you," Sam said. "I'm not going anywhere unless you ask me to." When Bucky managed to look over at him, Sam smiled a little, and said, "Can you focus on where my hand is touching your shoulder?"

At Bucky's nod, he continued. "Good," he said. "You're doing great. I'm going to count to two, and I want you to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth while I count, okay?"

 _In, one, two,_ his voice said. _Out, one, two._ Bucky's body somehow cooperated with Sam even while his mind was too busy whirling nonsensically, and eventually he felt Sam's hand rubbing his shoulder, and Sam's voice said, "Good, that's really good. I'm going to increase the count to four, okay?"

He had Bucky breathing in and out to ten by the time the door opened again. "I got this," Sam said. "Keep breathing, man, keep going, keep your head down. I'll take care of it. I'm just going to go over and I'll be right back, okay?"

"Okay," Bucky said, and Sam got up and went to the door. "What's going on?" said -- Steve's voice, it was _Steve_ , who was supposed to be -- giving his speech, not here, not here --

"I've got it under control," Sam said quietly. "It's okay, he's gonna be just fine. The best thing for you to do right now -- Steve, look at me, I am serious as hell -- the best thing for you to do is go back and finish."

Bucky glanced up and saw Steve peering in, his expression so worried, so fucking -- scared -- "Steve," Sam said, "if you let this derail your thing, you're just giving him something else to be upset about. He's gonna be fine. I got this. Go."

Steve nodded, and then backed away, and Sam closed the door and came back over, sitting down next to Bucky on the floor again. "He's gonna go finish his lecture," Sam said. "You feel like you could tell me what happened?"

"Too many people," Bucky managed. "There was this guy who kept -- looking at me, I don't know, I couldn't figure out what he was thinking, and --"

"Yeah, I get that," Sam said. After a couple more minutes, Bucky's breathing was more or less back to normal, and Sam scooted back a little, looked at him, and said, "Is it okay if I leave just for a minute to get you some water?"

Bucky nodded, so Sam got up and left and came back with a vending machine bottle of water, which Bucky drank slowly. And then by the time he was finished, he could hear the sounds of people walking past outside, which must mean the lecture was over. "Sorry I made you miss Steve's talk," Bucky said. "And -- thank you."

"No problem," Sam said. "It's really no problem, man. I'm sure it'll be on YouTube tomorrow anyway." He leaned back against the wall and they both waited until Steve came in, still trying to untangle himself from the mic's wires.

"Are you okay?" he said, immediately coming over and crouching down in front of Bucky, his hands reaching out, hesitating for a moment, and then touching Bucky's face.

"Yeah," Bucky said. "I'm sorry. I'm all right now." Mostly he wanted to get home before the second wave hit -- the shame.

"Almost everyone's gone," Steve said. "Do you want me to call the car?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Yeah, that would be good."

Steve and Sam walked him out to the car, and then they had a hushed conversation that Bucky probably could have heard if he'd wanted to, as he sat in the back seat with the door halfway closed. Steve slid in next to him after a minute, and the car pulled away from the curb.

"I'm sorry," Bucky said again, after a minute. "I'm sorry. How did it go?"

"You don't have to apologize," Steve said. "It was good, I think. They asked me some really tough questions, at the end. I just hope I didn't look like an ass."

At another time, Bucky would have made a joke there. _Well, you looking like an ass is kind of a given, I think people are used to it by now._ Something like that. Instead, he just said, "I'm sure you didn't."

Steve turned to look at him closely. He was quiet for about half a minute, wearing a slight frown. Eventually he opened his mouth, then shut it again, like he couldn't decide. He reached over and took Bucky's hand, almost tentatively. "Are you sure," he said slowly, "you're okay?"

Bucky realized in that moment that he couldn't do what he would normally have done, which was lie to Steve; that would only make it worse, would only perpetuate this vicious cycle where he couldn't seem to keep up his own facade and then ended up fucking up Steve's life -- and everyone else's -- because of it. "I think," he said, "I need to get out of the city for a while."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading; for those of you who have joined me on the journey of the Pain Train, rest assured: We have hit bottom. Please let me know if I've missed anything worthy of tagging for, and come say hello on [tumblr](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/) if you are so inclined! A new chapter will be up soon.


	6. breakwall

6.

The house was in northwestern Pennsylvania, right over the Ohio border. It was kind of falling apart. Bucky couldn't say exactly how he'd stumbled across it in the first place; Steve had left a lot of the house-shopping to him, and he'd fallen into a black hole of Zillow browsing which had little rhyme or reason to it. But there it was: Situated on ten acres of land, with one edge of the property bordered by Lake Erie, built in 1923, a Sears kit home. For sale by owner.

He called and left a voicemail, and a week later they were out in Pennsylvania having a look at it. It was pretty clear even from the road that nobody had lived there in a while -- the brush was all overgrown, vines up the mailbox, a long gravel driveway that needed some work. The owner's truck was sitting outside the house, which was actually even rougher looking than the photos. It needed a new roof, and, desperately, a new coat of paint.

Bucky parked the car and got out, pulling his baseball cap down a little further, and as he and Steve walked up toward the house, the door opened with a squeak and the owner, a man in probably his late fifties with an admirably full head of white hair and a ruddy complexion, came down to meet them. "Hello!" he called, ambling down the stairs. "I'm Jeff. I gotta say, the place has been on the market for a while, and I was kinda surprised to get a call at this point. We were about to take her off and see if we could fix her up a little bit, maybe."

"James," Bucky said, extending his hand, and then cocking his head to indicate Steve. "This is Steve."

"Nice to meet you," said Jeff, shaking Bucky's hand, and then doing a double take when he got a good look at Steve. "You said Steve?"

"Yes," Steve said. "Steve Rogers."

"Oh my," Jeff said. "I -- uh, sir, it's an honor. I thought -- you live in New York City, though, don't you?" He took another look at Bucky and got another comical look of surprise on his face. "I'm sorry, I just wasn't expecting --"

"No, no, it's all right," Steve said. "We're just looking to get out of the city for a while. Find some peace and quiet."

"Yes, sir, I can certainly understand that," Jeff said. "Plenty of that out here. I can tell you, I grew up here. This was my grandparents' place, and then my parents', and, well, now I suppose it's mine, but my wife and I decided a while back to move closer to the city, and we rented the place out for a couple of years, but not a lot of interest in renting a place way out in the middle of nowhere like this." He shook himself. "Geeze, I suppose I should show you the place, shouldn't I? C'mon in."

The disrepair was as evident on the inside as it had been on the outside, but Bucky and Steve shared a look: The bones of the house were still there. All the crown molding was intact, the beautiful set of French doors. "How's the floor under here?" Bucky asked, bending down to look under the fraying edge of some truly awful 70s shag carpet.

"Should be pretty good," Jeff said. "It's still exposed in some of the other parts of the house, the bedrooms and such. I think you could just pull up the carpet, strip it, and refinish it. All the plumbing's still all right, septic tank and all that. I know it doesn't _look_ good, but these old houses are nice, you know? It's mostly cosmetic stuff that needs fixing."

"Sure," Bucky said, walking into the breakfast nook, peering out the windows, which had a view of the back of the property and the lake. He went out onto the porch. It needed to have a lot of the screen replaced, and probably the door, but he had this vision of Steve sitting out there painting, and somehow he suddenly loved the house, shitty shag carpeting or not. Suddenly, he could see himself and Steve belonging here.

"Not a lot of folks looking for a fixer-upper these days, I think," Jeff said, showing them the basement. "Not with the economy the way it has been. Cheaper just to buy new construction."

"Well, me and Steve have something of an appreciation for old stuff," Bucky said, tossing Steve an ironic glance and receiving a grin in return. "There's a barn, too?"

"Yes sir," Jeff said. "Not in very good shape. Probably would be easier to knock it down and build a new one if you were planning on using it. Let me show it to you, it's out this way."

They walked around to the barn, which, true to Jeff's word, was dilapidated as hell, and then he showed them the rest of the property, which was all overgrown grass, a little bit of woods, and a steep incline that led down to the water. There was a set of rickety stairs -- "But I wouldn't use those," Jeff said with a laugh. "They were falling apart when _my_ kids were growing up, and that bank has eroded some since then. I think my dad put 'em up, though; they're nothing fancy. And if the two of you are already fixing up the rest of the place, that shouldn't be much more work."

"Can I ask -- why'd you decide to sell?" Steve asked.

"Oh, it was kind of a tough one," Jeff said. "Like I said, I have a lot of memories here. But my wife and I moved in closer to Erie some time ago, and we had four kids ourselves so we just needed more space. And we had always talked about moving back here, when they were grown, but they all moved further east -- Rachel, my youngest, she's in Erie, now, she's the closest -- and it turns out that Jeannie, my wife, well, she likes having folks a little closer." He stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled ruefully. "So I guess we finally supposed that somebody else ought to get a chance to enjoy it. No sense in letting it sit empty any longer."

Steve nodded, looking out over the lake, which was smooth as glass and glittered in the afternoon sunlight. "Must have been a hell of a place to grow up," he said.

"It was, it was," Jeff agreed. "S'pose New York City must have been a hell of a place to grow up too, though."

"You're not wrong about that," Bucky said. "Especially with this one bound and determined to get into any kind of trouble he could manage, and then some."

Jeff laughed. "Sounds like my Rachel," he said. "What can you do?"

"Not a goddamn thing," Bucky said, and when he caught Steve's eye, Steve was smiling kind of a small, pleased, private smile, a smile that Bucky had only ever seen him use on two people -- himself, and Peggy.

"No, you can't," Jeff said, with another laugh. They walked back across the property to where Jeff's truck and the car were parked, and Jeff turned toward them again. "Anything else I can show you two?"

"I don't think so," Steve said, reaching out to shake Jeff's hand once more. "Thank you, sir, we'll be in touch."

Bucky shook Jeff's hand too, and Jeff clasped his hand and said, "I just have to say -- it's really an honor, it really is. I thank the two of you for coming all the way out here. It's been a pleasure talking with you."

"Thank you," Bucky said. "Like Steve said, we'll be in touch."

They got in the car and Bucky managed a very tight turn and drove them slowly back down the gravel road back to the highway, if you could call it that. Neither he nor Steve said anything for a minute, and then, as they were getting back on 90, Steve said, "That place was a wreck."

"Yeah," Bucky said.

"I think I want to buy it," Steve said. Bucky turned to look at him and smiled.

"Me too," he said.

+++

"I don't know when we'll be back," Bucky said to Pepper. He reached across the table and took her hand. "I'm sorry. I really am, I feel like I'm letting everybody down, and especially you, after you did so much for me, you know --"

"No," Pepper said, shaking her head. "No, no, you're not, James. I won't say that the work we're doing isn't important -- I'm a bad liar anyway -- but to me? What's _really_ important is that you feel better. And you're my friend; I respect you. I trust that you know what you need to do."

She was so kind to him; Bucky ran his hand through his hair, picked up his glass of wine with that hand, his other still holding onto hers, and took a drink from it. "It's okay, James," Pepper said. "It's really okay. No matter how long it takes. As long as I'm CEO of this company, and as long as this company exists, you'll have a place here, if you want it."

"Thank you," Bucky said. It didn't stop him from feeling sorry and ashamed; he was almost glad that Natasha was on a long mission with Clint in Argentina, because he knew that she would see it the same way as he did -- he was running away, and it didn't feel good to know that, even if he also knew that he needed some time away from everyone staring at him, everyone knowing him, and his history, everywhere he went.

In all the time he’d been "back," he hadn't really been back, anyway - he had hardly seen anyone other than Steve and a little bit of Sam. Pepper was so busy and his schedule so odd that this was only the second time he was seeing her, the first being that time she'd come by the apartment when he still had the pins in his leg. He wanted to say _I'll miss you_ , but he was still missing her right now; he had come back, but he was realizing in this moment how few of the important parts of his life he'd come back with.

She squeezed his hand. "Will you come visit?" he blurted, which was hilarious -- he couldn't really see Pepper, who was the epitome of a city mouse, having much fun out in the middle of nowhere with him and Steve.

"I'll make time," Pepper said. "I promise." And the thing about her was, Bucky knew she meant it. She wouldn't promise if she didn't fully intend to follow through, and she'd probably move mountains to keep her promise, if she had to.

"Pep," he said, pained, "I know I haven't been a very good friend, but --"

She cut him off, interrupting him again with a shake of her head and a quick movement of her free hand, slicing through the air. "You don't have to apologize to me for the fact that something terrible and out of your control happened to you, or that you need to take time to recover from that," she said. "And I don't think less of you for the fact that I've seen you hurting, James. I know I can't stop you from thinking less of yourself, but I wish I could. I understand what it's like to be afraid, to feel like you're helpless and useless -- trust me, I think being useless is my greatest fear in the whole world."

She laughed. "But I don't think you're a bad friend. And I don't want you to think I do. I just think you've been through so much I can't possibly understand it, and you're going through a difficult time right now. But that's just it -- you're going _through_ it. And I know you well enough to know that you're going to come out the other side of it, and I want you to trust me that even if I can't come through it with you, I'll be there waiting for you on the other side, okay?"

"What if I don't, though," Bucky said, his voice brittle and thin. "What if I just -- I can't get better."

"Everything gets better," Pepper said. "Even if it's only in small increments." She smiled, her thumb stroking over his knuckles. "Anyway -- I'm here right now, aren't I? I'm not running screaming in the other direction."

Bucky smiled a little too. He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, "I'm just -- tired of being like this," he said. "I'm tired of putting this on Steve, on you, on Natasha, on Sam. On everybody. I'm sick of making everyone tiptoe around and take care of me."

"You can't stop us taking care of you, James," Pepper said. "We do it because we want to, because we love you."

"I know," Bucky said. And he did, at least superficially, in a way that didn't really stick. He perceived that they had their reasons for wanting to help him, but the machinations of his mind always turned it into pity or obligation. He didn't know when he'd gotten that way, or if it was something he'd always felt, that he ought to be able to take care of himself. "I don't know what I did to deserve any of it."

"It doesn't matter," Pepper said. "You don't _have_ to do anything." She sighed, squeezed his hand again, and then let go, picking up her wine glass instead. "I'll come visit you. You just have to promise me that you'll make sure the house isn't infested with spiders. Tony used to have this lake house, and it was absolutely filled with spiders. He accidentally sold it in his sleep one summer. He never used it anyway; I don't think he even noticed."

"No spiders," Bucky said. "Got it."

"I think they like the damp, or something," Pepper said. "Maybe the mosquitoes."

"You love the great outdoors, don't you," Bucky said.

"As if you're any better," Pepper said. "You and Steve both grew up in the city too. What even possessed you to buy a house in Pennsylvania, of all places?"

"Oh, you know," Bucky said. "Or you ought to, you were just talking all about it: The mysterious charms of a fixer-upper."

+++

They bought a used truck off Craigslist, hitched a trailer to it, and packed up everything that mattered. It was strangely satisfying to Bucky, that everything he cared about owning still fit neatly inside a single trailer. It made him feel briefly like he wasn't as disconnected from the life he'd started out with as he often felt he was.

The drive was almost eight hours on a good day, and there was traffic that meant it took closer to ten. When they got there, both of them were bleary-eyed and tired -- it was funny, how Bucky knew that there had been missions where he'd kept going and going without a second thought for a lot longer, but sometimes it was these mundane things that took it out of him more than anything.

They carried their mattress and a couple of blankets inside, and went to sleep right there, with the mattress in the middle of the living room floor. Bucky woke up the next morning to the loud, bright sound of birdsong, and sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes. Next to him, Steve was already awake, staring around at the state of the house.

"Jesus christ," Bucky said, reaching over and peeling some paint off the wall. Steve laughed, got up, went into the yard in his underwear, and came back with the coffeemaker tucked under his arm.

For just about the first month, all they did was make the place livable. They didn't bother unloading a lot of stuff, because all of the floors needed to be redone, the walls painted. Instead, they slept on the mattress in the living room, which was an odd comfort to Bucky (and, Bucky privately suspected, Steve too) because it reminded him of sleeping with Steve's skinny shoulders and sharp elbows bumping into him before the war.

Steve was in charge of painting, and Bucky put himself to work doing the floors -- ripping up the carpet, stripping and sanding the hardwood underneath, refinishing it all. They'd decided to do the interior first, figuring they'd wait until it was warmer to start work on the exterior paint and the roof, and by the time they were finished, the floors looked mostly good as new, the walls were all clean and fresh, and it was the beginning of June.

It was the happiest Bucky could remember being in a while. He got up in the morning, had coffee, worked until he was exhausted, and went to sleep. It was uncomplicated. There was nobody around to bother them; the closest grocery store was a twenty-minute drive away, and just about everything else was further than that. If they had neighbors, they never came around. In a way, it was easy, not to forget, but -- to put it all out of his mind, the reasons for being here, the black cloud that loomed in the back of his head.

There was a heat wave in the second week of June. It was almost ninety on Thursday, and Bucky was on the roof with his shirt off, ripping up old rotten shingles and replacing them with new ones. Below him, he could hear Steve moving around, the sound of his paint scraper and occasionally the soft buzz of his voice as he sang along with the stereo he'd brought out into the yard. The whole place smelled like life; there were a bunch of hydrangea bushes and lilacs all blooming, lovely purples and blues, and the trees and overgrown grass were green and damp with overnight dew. Bucky could look out and see the lake over the tops of the trees. Sometimes an ore boat went by, on its way to Ashtabula or Erie.

They hadn't really talked a lot about anything other than the house. Steve seemed just as pleased to have a concrete problem occupying his time as Bucky was. And while this all felt familiar to Bucky, the simplicity of physical labor, he realized it must be something new and different for Steve, to be able to work his body all day into a state of exhaustion that was neither a premature symptom of sickness or a foregone conclusion of intense combat.

Steve climbed up the ladder and leaned his elbows on the edge of the roof, looking at Bucky. "I was going to make lunch," he said. "You want a sandwich?"

"Yeah," Bucky said, wiping sweat from his face with his forearm. "Two? Please and thank you."

Steve disappeared again and came back up about ten minutes later juggling a plate of sandwiches, two empty glasses, and a full pitcher of lemonade. Bucky scooted over so Steve could hand them over, and Steve did, clambering up onto the roof. It wasn't easy figuring out how to maneuver the food and drink with the entire roof at a slant, but they'd both solved more complex problems than that in their lives, and anyway, it wasn't like the stakes were particularly high, either.

"I think you're getting sunburnt," Steve said, reaching over and touching the tops of Bucky's shoulders, squinting at him in the bright light.

"You are too," Bucky said. "Your nose, you should put sunscreen on there." He peered around at Steve's back -- Steve had the good sense to be wearing a t-shirt, at least. "And the back of your neck. You're going to have a hell of a farmer's tan."

"I don't know if we have any sunscreen," Steve said. "We might have to run into town."

"You sure? I swear we had some in the bathroom cabinet, in the tower," Bucky said. "Did we not pack it?"

"Maybe not," Steve said. They lapsed into silence for a while, eating their sandwiches and emptying the pitcher of lemonade. Bucky had no idea how long it'd been since he'd had lemonade. A long time. A long, long time.

"How's the painting coming?" he asked.

"Not bad," Steve said. "I keep thinking how I would never have been able to do it, you know?"

"I was thinking that too," Bucky said. "The roof's all right. I think I can get it done today."

"Good," Steve said, smiling. "You can help me paint, then. It makes my hands tired, scraping the old paint off." He paused, looking out over the lake, reached out after a minute and took Bucky's hand. "It's nice here."

Bucky nodded. "We need to get a move on with replacing the screens on the porch, though," he said. "About a million mosquitoes are gonna hatch out in a week or so and if we don't have all those holes fixed up we're going to regret everything."

"All right," Steve said. "So we'll go get sunscreen and -- what do we need for that?"

"New screen, mostly," Bucky said. "Most of the holes can be patched. Maybe some lumber. I'll have to take a better look at it after I'm done here."

"Well, we can drive into town and get that tonight," Steve said. "I know there's some kind of hardware store in Conneaut -- that's probably closest." He stretched, arms over his head, and then stacked the plates and the cups, gathering them back up. "Jeff told me there's a good pizza place there, if you want to maybe get something to eat, too."

"Sure," Bucky said. "Pizza sounds good." And it would be good for them to get out for a little while. It would be good for Steve, mostly. Bucky didn't necessarily care one way or another. He waited for Steve to get back on the ladder, and then handed the pitcher over to him, picking up his hammer and another shingle.

Steve took the pitcher and then just stayed there for a second. He got a funny expression on his face, sort of determined, and then leaned up and kissed Bucky, his arms full of stuff, standing on a step of the ladder you weren't even supposed to stand on. Bucky kissed him back, and had to put the shingle down so he could put his hand on Steve's cheek instead.

They broke apart when the ladder wobbled slightly. "You're going to fall off and break your goddamn neck," Bucky said. "And god only knows where the nearest hospital is. Get back down there."

Steve smiled at him, starry-eyed and pink-cheeked in a way that made Bucky feel very strange, even now, like a warm hand was squeezing his stomach. He disappeared back down the ladder. Bucky shook his head, picked up his shingle again, and got back to work.

+++

Bucky was sunburnt, sore in a pleasant way, and tired by the time the sun went down. He'd finished the roof about four, and had gone down to help Steve painting the rest of the day. Steve was as bossy about home repair, it turned out, as he was in anything else. He kept ordering Bucky where to go and what to do, a couple of times coming over to inspect Bucky's work and deeming it subpar, to which Bucky responded by painting a broad stripe of grey-blue up Steve's shirt and onto his face and neck.

They drove along the lake into Conneaut, down to the couple of blocks that comprised "downtown." There was a Dollar General and a locally-owned hardware store, both of which were about to close, so he and Steve split up and each took one errand -- Steve to the Dollar General, Bucky to the hardware store. He was loading the lumber and screen into the back of the truck when Steve came out carrying a plastic bag and a pool noodle.

"We needed that, huh," he said to Steve, who threw it in the cab of the truck.

"I got a raft too," Steve said. "I don't know, they were about three dollars."

"The spirit seized you, did it," Bucky said, adjusting the rubber band holding his hair back, then folding his arms -- he was wearing the sleeve tonight, the one that he'd worn on the mission with Natasha, designed to disguise his left arm. Better safe than sorry. "Where's this pizza place?"

"Down one of these blocks," Steve said. "It's called Rainbow."

Bucky turned to look and spotted it, just at the end of the block they were parked on. He was unaccountably nervous; Steve was wearing a baseball cap, but there was no telling, really. The place was tiny, when they walked in, with a sign that said to seat yourself. There was only one table open, anyway, over by a jukebox and a pool table, and so he and Steve went over and sat down.

The waitress, mid-forties with bleached-blonde hair and that sort of leathery skin that spoke of a life of summers spent at the beach, came over after she'd visited the other tables, gave them each a menu, and took their drink orders. There was a second, where she was looking at Steve and Bucky's heart started beating fast, but she just said, "What can I get you?" and Steve ordered a beer, so even if she did recognize him, it didn't matter.

The pizza took forever. Twenty-five minutes into waiting, they got up and went over to the pool table. "I haven't played pool in so long," Steve said, shaking his head and laughing.

"Yeah, I remember," Bucky said. "You were terrible." He slotted some quarters into the table and handed Steve a cue, racking the balls. "You go first, you break."

Steve squinted, maneuvered himself around the table trying to figure out how it should work for him, and then took his shot. He still wasn't very good, although Bucky knew with practice he'd get a lot better. He took solids, and Bucky had stripes; he probably could have run the table if he'd tried, but that was no fun. He let Steve win instead.

The pizza, when it finally came, was delicious. "Have to thank Jeff for the recommendation," Bucky said, watching the waitress talk to a couple of the guys sitting at the bar with easy familiarity. There was some kind of deer hunting simulator over in the corner behind the pool table, by the bathrooms. It was tempting -- mostly he was curious, he knew he could --

He didn't, though. He didn't want to attract attention. Instead they finished their pizza and Bucky tried, unsuccessfully, to talk Steve out of leaving a preposterous tip, and they drove down by the marina and looked out at the lighthouse and the lake in the dark, and then they went home. They still hadn't properly put the bed together. It didn't matter to Bucky, who took his shirt and pants off and climbed onto the mattress, felt it dip as Steve settled next to him. It didn't matter. He felt pretty good. Almost normal.

+++

It took Bucky about a week to fix up the porch. It was slow going; the screen was difficult to work with, all sharp edges that left him with a myriad of tiny scratches and cuts on his hand, which stung for about the entire hour or so that they lasted. It probably would have gone faster if Steve had really been helping him, but Steve, the maniac, was obsessive about making the trim perfect, and spent at least four days just finishing that up. And then he did try to help, but he kept getting distracted and eventually just went and got his sketchbook and sat drawing Bucky as Bucky worked instead. Bucky didn't have it in him to be irritated -- Steve enjoyed it, and Bucky didn't really _need_ the help. A second set of hands would have made the work faster, but out here, they had all the fucking time in the world.

Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was that once they finished the porch and started to really put the house together, finally unloading everything properly and settling it into his place, he realized he didn't know what he was going to do after this.

He tried not to let it get to him. There was still plenty to do. They started doing yardwork, after they'd finished with the house; the grass needed to be cut like crazy, and there were tree limbs to be removed. And then the little stretch of beach below the bank at the edge of the property. The bank itself had become overgrown, the stairs down were unusable, and the beach was all full of burrs, rocks, trash, and fish bones.

Bucky did a lot of it himself. Steve would always come and start working next to him, but then inevitably he'd go to get lunch and come back with his sketchbook or a pad of watercolor paper, and spend most of the afternoon drawing instead. Bucky found Steve's sketchbook laying open one evening while Steve was in the shower, and flipped through a few pages of it, feeling guilty. There were a few loose watercolors of the sunsets, which were becoming astonishingly beautiful as the summer progressed. But mostly there were drawings of Bucky, full enough of barely-restrained desire that even Bucky could recognize it. It looked like Steve had been in the process of transferring one of them onto a big sheet of watercolor paper.

He was still looking at them when Steve came out of the shower, toweling off. "We need to get a bigger shower," Steve said vaguely. "I mean, that one's fine, but I'm always afraid I'm going to brain myself on the showerhead." He glanced up, saw what Bucky was looking at, and came over too, flipping through a few pages himself.

Bucky had gained back most of the weight he'd lost, and the muscle mass, but there was something about him that was still sharper, and it was evident in Steve's sketches, the way he drew in the hard lines of Bucky's jaw, his shoulders, collarbones, hips. The drawings looked brittle, like a scab over a barely-healed wound, the way Bucky felt when he stopped to think about it too long. But there it was: Steve wanted that anyway. He drew Bucky like those painters had drawn the women they wanted to fuck, not the way they painted the women from the Bible, or mythology. The drawings were worshipful, sure, but in a distinctly physical sort of way. Nothing saintly about them.

"It's kind of making me crazy," Steve said. "Seeing you, all the time, just --" he colored and looked away for a second. "You look good, you know. And you always have your shirt off, and -- I don't know." He was too bashful to tell Bucky in words, but he didn't have to, because the pictures said it all, the careful way he rendered Bucky's hair falling in his face, the sinuous curve of Bucky's spine, even the attention he paid to Bucky's hands.

Bucky didn't know what to say. It didn't feel safe, any of it. It felt almost like knowing he wanted Steve had, before he knew Steve felt the same way. Like something secret, something that needed to be protected. Something he wasn't capable of acting on. "Maybe we'll take a break tomorrow," Bucky said finally. "Go to the beach, or something."

There was a flash of disappointment on Steve's face, but then he smiled, ducking his head, running a hand over his wet hair. "You know, we _have_ a beach now," he said.

"Yeah, and it's full of fish bones and hornet nests," Bucky said. "You want to go lay on the beach with the wasps and the dead fish, you feel free. I was talking about the township park, or something."

"Sure," Steve said. "That sounds nice." He went downstairs, and came back with a beer for himself and a glass of water for Bucky, sat down, and kept working on the drawing. Bucky sat in bed, watching him and thinking, _what the fuck am I doing?_

+++

The feeling persisted the entire next day. The slight itch of it, waking up, showering off the previous day's work, like the tickling feet of a tiny insect he couldn't quite catch, all over his body. They hardly had cell phone service out here, never mind internet -- though that was one of their projects, sometime, one of the ones they'd put further down the list. It wasn't strictly a necessity.

He thought about it as they rode in the truck with the windows down, toward Conneaut. Steve had put the radio on, and in between the songs sometimes there were snippets of the news, just the briefest summations of things going on in the world. It made him think how isolated they were out here. How much they weren't doing.

He didn't know how Steve could stand it, walking down the boardwalk. He didn't know how _he_ could stand it, spreading out one of the dropcloths they'd been using to keep paint off the floor, weighting it down with heavy flat stones to keep it from blowing away. Watching Steve with his hand shading his eyes, squinting out at the lighthouse. It was probably painfully obvious what the both of them were made for, especially when you looked at them, their bodies formed by and for violence -- weapons, the products of fear, of war, compared with everyone else. The kids, running up and down the beach, skinny limbs, high voices. Grandparents, soft, skin sagging, fragile.

He and Steve had been kids like those once, too, but it felt so far away. Unreachable, sometimes. Now -- here they were, and they were -- they'd been _changed_ , and he was trying to hide from it, to take Steve somewhere and hide, and it couldn't be good for anyone. Least of all Steve, who had that goddamn duty-driven sense of honor, who had to know all the shit that was going on in the world around them that he could be helping with.

"Hey," Steve said. Bucky turned to look at him, and Steve said, "C'mere, you've got --" and undid Bucky's hair from its knot, ran his hands through it to smooth it out, and then tied it up for him again.

Bucky glanced around, but none of the people on the beach were paying attention. "Sunscreen," he said. "You got the sunscreen?"

"Yeah," Steve said, and handed it over. Bucky squeezed some out and warmed it up on his hands and put it on Steve. Steve had always been soft-skinned, as far as Bucky remembered it, but before he hadn't felt -- almost velvety, like he did now, with the padding of fat and smooth muscle. Steve tipped his head forward, his mouth parting a little, eyes heavy-lidded. It was strange, Bucky thought. It was strange that things like this, something this simple, still felt good to them, after everything else. He rubbed his thumb against the back of Steve's ear.

"You want some on your shoulders?" Steve said. Bucky glanced down at himself; he was pretty evenly brown everywhere now, with the exception of the places that his shorts covered. His shoulders and the tops of his feet were a sort of brick red color, though, so he nodded, and heard Steve squeezing out some sunscreen into his own hand.

"We should get the aerosol kind," he said. "It'd be faster."

"I kind of like this," Steve said, smoothing sunscreen along the back of Bucky's neck. "Besides, aerosol's bad for the ozone."

Bucky gave him an ironic look, and Steve smiled. "What were you looking at?" he asked Bucky, after he'd finished. "You looked distracted."

Bucky glanced off in the direction he'd been looking before. There were a bunch of seagulls, chasing each other around in the sand, bobbing on the gentle waves of the lake. "The seagulls?" Steve asked.

"Which one do you think's in charge?" Bucky asked.

"The one on the trash can," Steve said, pointing.

"Nah," Bucky said. "That one's still a baby. The ones with the brown spots are babies."

"Teenagers, maybe," Steve said. "I don't know. Which one do you think's in charge?"

"None of them," Bucky said. "It's total anarchy. Don't you know anything about seagulls?"

"Not as much as you, apparently," Steve said. 

"Oh, I don't know anything," Bucky said. "I'm just making it up as I go." He dodged the handful of sand Steve tossed at him, and then lay back on the blanket, towel rolled up under his head, staring at the cloudless sky. He sort of dozed off eventually, and when he woke up, Steve was drawing the lighthouse -- a surprisingly detailed version of it, considering how far off it was.

"You want to walk over there?" he said to Steve. "I think we can go out on the breakwall."

"Yeah, sure," Steve said. "And then we should go get some food. I'm starving."

They started down the beach; it was about a five minute walk down to where the breakwall started, and once they were out on it, Bucky could see that there was a small gap in the middle maybe a hundred feet from the lighthouse. It was pretty slippery, the rocks uneven. He had a feeling it was one of those places that drunk teenagers died, that developed a sort of reputation, a dark allure.

"Do you think we could swim across there?" Steve asked, sitting down on the edge of the gap. Bucky could see the way the water whirled around; there was probably a strong current, differentiating the waters of the open lake from the calm inside the breakwall. You'd have to be a good swimmer to make it.

"We could make it, yeah," Bucky said. "You want to?"

He watched for few moments as Steve's gaze flickered between the water and the lighthouse. Steve clearly _did_ want to, but was uncertain, for whatever reason, and that, maybe more than anything, struck Bucky as wrong. Steve ought to just be jumping in, like the fool he was, but he was waiting for something instead.

Bucky dove smoothly into the water, arms over his head, and started swimming across. He hadn't been wrong, the current was strong, and it wanted to whip him back and forth. After a moment, he felt Steve land in the water beside him. Twenty seconds later he pulled himself out onto the stones at opposite side of the gap, levered himself up, and offered Steve a hand so Steve could do the same.

Steve pulled himself up, got to his feet, and slicked his wet hair back. The difference in temperature between the cool water and the warm air made goosebumps crop up all over him, and Bucky watched him shiver, like he was shaking something off. He went toward the lighthouse.

Up close it wasn't much. Mostly cobwebbed, shut up. Probably nobody had been in there in a while; there sure as hell wasn't any lighthouse keeper living in there. "I should have brought my sketchbook," Steve said.

"How?" Bucky said. "It would have gotten wet."

"I don't know," Steve said. "I could have gone first, you could have thrown it across to me." He put his hand on the side of the lighthouse. "Next time."

Bucky watched him walk around. A couple of boats went by, going in through the larger gap toward the marina. One of them slowed down, came close. The man driving it leaned over and shouted out, "You guys okay?"

Bucky nodded and waved at him, and the guy looked over at the gap. "You just swim across that?" he asked.

"Yes sir," Steve said. "We're all right. Thank you."

"Okay," the guy said. "Well, have a nice day." He turned the motor on the boat back up and steered it away, and Bucky found himself wondering how many people _had_ drowned trying to get to this spot.

"We should go back," he said to Steve.

"Yeah, I know," Steve said. "I'm hungry, anyway." So they walked back across the breakwall, swam the gap, went back to shore. They sat up at the picnic tables by the concession stand, listening to the creak of swings and seesaws as kids played on them, eating corn dogs and ice cream. Wholesome. Like the best parts, the most fleeting moments of Bucky's childhood. Even the feeling of being tempered and made careful by fear -- even that was familiar.

+++

That night he dreamed. He'd been watching Steve draw all evening. It was almost hypnotic, and even more so for the fact that Steve got swallowed up in it too. He reached a certain point where he became almost insensible to anything around him, and hours would go by where all he did was shift and look down at his paper and draw and draw. And there it was, in Bucky's dream, the lighthouse, rising ghostly and silent at night.

Someone came toward him, walking out on the breakwall. The surf was high at night, so high that it crested the top of the rock wall, lapped Bucky's feet and ankles, made him unsteady and afraid of slipping. He turned to look over his shoulder, compelled by the feeling that he should be running, not walking -- trying to get away by whatever means necessary.

It was just Steve. Steve coming toward him. But it wasn't Steve at all, it was --

\-- he felt gripped, squeezed. That feeling, the white-out, and then the graying down of everything around him, as the mask of emotionlessness settled around him like a heavy blanket. And then abruptly it wasn't the lighthouse at all, but rather a busy intersection. People were shouting at him, in a language he didn't understand. He stared at them, and their anger was somehow incomprehensible. None of it mattered; he was looking for something, and he had to find it.

He couldn't remember, even in the dream, what he'd been looking for. Somehow he just knew, after some time had passed, that it wasn't here. He stood up from where he was kneeling in the street and moved on. It was hot. It smelled like bread, sweat, spices. None of it meant anything.

He woke up gasping and sweating, too-hot under even the light sheet he and Steve had been sleeping with. They hadn't put in A/C, and the bedroom had gotten oppressively warm during the night. He looked at the clock. Two forty-eight in the morning.

Steve was sound asleep. Bucky could barely look at him for a minute, afraid that Steve would open his eyes and Bucky wouldn't see Steve at all, that whatever had taken him before had come back for both of them. But -- it was _gone_ , wasn't it? It had to be, it wouldn't have just let him go. Would it?

He got out of bed and went silently down the ordinarily-creaky stairs, through the kitchen and the porch, back out into the yard. The grass was cool and wet with dew, brushing his ankles. He walked back toward the tree line, toward the edge of the property, the lake. The moon was huge, bright, illuminating the whole scene with a sort of opalescent light, turning it all to silver and blue.

There was a rise near the northwest corner of their land, a slight hill where the incline down to the lake was steepest, like a cliff. He stood out on the point, the sharpest edge. The lake was so still, so unmoving, the horizon perfect and flat. He knew what that was like. Where Hydra had failed, somebody else had come along and succeeded. And it was somehow worse, actually having been stripped of what it meant to be essentially human, than it had been to try and fail.

It was gone. It was behind him. But he didn't know it for sure. He'd never know it for sure. And like Pepper had said, a long time ago, at Christmas -- somebody could come along anytime they wanted and change you. Nobody could promise him it wouldn't happen again. He couldn't even promise it to himself.

He looked down at the smooth, perfect surface of the lake. The trees and the waves, whispering their soft sounds, crickets chirping. It was deep here. Deep enough.

He stepped off the edge. It was a short fall, and then the slap of the water against his skin, and the shock of the temperature difference. He stayed under for a while. It was so dark down there. The moonlight showed less, under the water.

He surfaced and heard the sound of his name, in Steve's voice, desperate shouting. He could hear Steve running through the brush, and then crashing through tree branches out onto the overlook. Steve skidded to the edge of the cliff, his face a white mask of horror like one of those theatre masks, and his cry of _Bucky?!_ cut off abruptly as he saw Bucky down there in the water.

Steve doubled over, his hand on his chest. The last time Bucky had seen him like that had been in the winter; Steve had rounded a corner, his eyes watering, his nose running, and Bucky had barely even had time to ask him, "What the fuck are you doing?" before the guys who were after him had caught up. Steve hadn't been a lot of help in that fight, right on the verge of an asthma attack as he was, and he'd been pretty fucked up the entire week after, too, just recovering from a cold that had almost turned into pneumonia and then this piled on top of it. Bucky had taken an elbow to the eye and sprained his wrist, and the girl he was dating had taken one look at him and decided maybe she didn't want to be seen with him if he was going to be _getting in fights_.

"I thought," Steve gasped, and Bucky returned to the present, "I thought, Bucky, I thought --"

"It's fine," Bucky said. "Steve, it's deep enough here." And after a moment, Steve dove down into the water too and came up next to Bucky, floating on his back. Bucky reached over and put his hand on Steve's chest, felt Steve's heart, still beating fast.

"You just _jumped,_ " Steve said. "I thought -- I don't know."

Bucky was quiet. The waves lapped at the shore. In a hundred years that cliff probably wouldn't be there at all; it was gradually eroding, gradually getting washed away in the tiniest of increments. Maybe you couldn't even measure something like that until enough time had gone by. "It just keeps going," he said eventually. "You just -- you just have to keep letting it happen, you know? And everyone wants -- I want -- to say it's over. I want to say it'll never happen again. Not just for you, but for me, too. I wish that there was some -- just a crumb, you know? Just a crumb of certainty, about anything."

Steve turned to look at him, his eyes glinting a sort of lavender platinum in the moonlight, reflecting the color of the lake. He was incredible. He always had been. "I don't want to do this to you," Bucky said. "When I thought it was just me, when I was just the asset, it was fine. It's easier to handle pain when it's just you that it's hurting. But I love you. I'm crazy for you, I'd --"

He started to say _I'd die for you,_ but the thing was, Steve knew it. Bucky _had_ died for him once before, and it had either done them no good at all, or it had been the only thing in the world that could have saved them, depending on how you looked at it. And he had -- he'd been willing, he'd gone into that abyss with his eyes wide open, knowing what he'd chosen. He'd do it again if he had to. But he didn't want to.

"Bucky, it wasn't fine," Steve said. "You know that, don't you? You don't deserve to be -- you don't deserve people hurting you. You don't deserve to be in pain."

"The things they used me to do," Bucky said. "What the fuck kind of world do we live in, if I have all that blood on my hands and I don't -- deserve to feel it? It's not -- it's not that. It's -- I don't know if you want to hear it."

Steve sighed, dipping under the water for a moment and then coming back up, slicking his hair flat to his head. "I don't know if I _want_ to hear it either," he said. "But I'm starting to think I need to."

Bucky rotated for a moment, flipping over onto his stomach in a dead-man's float, face-down in the water, looking into blackness. When he turned back over, all the loose strands of his hair went into his face for a second, like the arms of a jellyfish or something. "Hydra spent so long trying to turn me into nothing," he said. "To, you know, eliminate all the processes that made me a person. They worked so hard to burn it all out of me, all the memories, the feelings. To make me not want any of it, just to want to obey. And it _didn't work._ The things, the worst things I remember aren't the things that they made me do, because I know those things weren't my fault, and --"

He glanced at Steve. "When I think about it, even growing up, I was always hurting somebody in the service of somebody else. Even you -- don't try denying it. And then in the war, at some point I just, I lost the sense of what was normal, really. It started to feel normal, you know, like I was accomplishing something. And that's what it felt like for a long time. Maybe it still does. Like you're good at something, you do it, it helps someone, in the end. Everybody was dying anyway, on the front. People were going to die no matter what I did. Christ, there were times you couldn't avoid just -- walking on bodies, you couldn't even tell them from the mud in some places. I just did what I could to make sure the people dying were the ones I'd rather have dead."

Steve nodded, his mouth tight. "The things that are the worst to remember," Bucky said, "Are -- being afraid, because I knew I couldn't do what they wanted. Or being ashamed, knowing I fucked up, and I was gonna keep fucking up." He sucked in a breath. "But what happened -- what happened when I got taken away, it was -- that thing could do what, what Hydra always wanted. It just shut me off. It shut off everything that made me me. It used whatever was useful and the rest was just nothing. And when I remember this stuff, that's the thing, it's like I'm seeing it for the first time, almost. Because there's no feeling, nothing attached to the memories. So I'm -- I'm feeling it for the first time, and then the -- disgust, I guess, the disgust that comes from knowing I didn't, that I couldn't before."

He felt simultaneously lighter and heavier when he'd finished talking, and also completely exhausted. Steve stayed quiet next to him for a minute, his arms and legs moving slowly, quietly in the water as he floated. "I would kill it," he said. "I want to kill it."

"Me too," Bucky said. "But -- it's gone. And anyway, how do you even kill something without a body?"

"I don't know," Steve said. "But if it ever comes back, I'll find a way."

Bucky let out a creaky laugh, and started to swim back toward shore, rounding the point he'd jumped off, moving back toward an area where there was some beach and the terrain sloped a little more gently. He heard Steve following, and when he climbed out, Steve was right behind him. He reached out to touch Bucky's shoulder, and turned him gently. They were both in just their underwear, and Bucky felt Steve's gaze rake up his body almost like a physical touch for a few seconds before Steve leaned in to kiss him.

They climbed back up the bank, sending clods of sandy loose soil careening down as they went, and walked back through the dark to the house, which sat gleaming warmly with the porch light that Steve must have turned on as he came running out. Steve led Bucky by the hand back upstairs, sat Bucky down in the bed, and then crouched in front of him, in the vee of Bucky's legs, his hands on Bucky's knees. "Will you explain this to me?" he asked.

Bucky wanted to deny knowing what he meant, but in the moment, he couldn't, so he settled for silence instead. "Please," Steve said. "I just want to understand."

"I don't know," Bucky said. "It's stupid. I don't want to fuck this up. I don't want to say yes just because I think I should."

"You don't want to?" Steve asked.

It was more complicated than that. "I don't know if I want to," Bucky said. "It's not that easy. I'm afraid -- I don't know, I'm afraid I'll get this all tangled up with the rest of it and it'll -- it'll ruin it, somehow."

Steve looked up at him, his expression all concern, consternation. "I don't think there is a way to ruin it," he said. "I don't -- I still want you, you know that."

"I know," Bucky said. "And I know I want you, I just -- I don't know if I want to feel good."

Steve's eyebrows converged further inward. His fingers tightened a little, cupping Bucky's damp, clammy knees. It sounded pretty dumb when Bucky said it out loud, and if that was what Steve was thinking, Bucky couldn't blame him. "Jesus," Bucky said. "I'm sorry, this is -- it's got me in knots, it's the stupidest thing--"

"If you don't want to, that's one thing," Steve said. "But if you don't think you _deserve_ to...." He let go of Bucky's knees and sat on the bed next to Bucky instead, reaching over and cupping Bucky's jaw, turning Bucky's face so that he could kiss Bucky. "Tell me if you want me to stop," he said.

"Okay," Bucky said, barely a whisper, his voice swallowed up by Steve's mouth. After a minute, he shifted, lying down on the bed, pulling Steve with him; Steve was so solid, so warm, and his weight was somehow comforting in some totally unquantifiable way -- he was _here,_ and he was real, they both were --

Steve's hands found his hair, and worked it gently out of the snarled mess it had become, untangling the stretched-out rubber band Bucky'd been holding most of it back with, tossing it aside. It was still damp. Probably it'd be damp for hours. It was kind of cold, too, but Steve didn't seem to mind, his thumbs sliding over Bucky's scalp, his mouth hot against Bucky's.

He slid his hands down Bucky's chest. Bucky couldn't help but think about the places where his bones were still too prominent, where everything felt too close to the surface, but it was -- that was the past, and this was now, Steve's palms, that callus on his right pointer finger where he held a brush, scraping against the underside of one of Bucky's pectorals, making Bucky laugh breathlessly and squirm a little. He opened his eyes and looked at Steve, who was smiling, in between kisses, that same fond, private smile. He thought of the moon's reflection on the lake, whole, unbroken.

Maybe that was it, maybe that was the comfort. The cliff that wouldn't be there in a hundred years, the steady washing away of the stone, the moon that watched everything and saw nothing. The world as a whole was insensate to his and Steve's personal suffering, and it was only their actions and the echoes of them that lived on. And maybe someday not even those would exist. Someday everything would be wiped away.

But that was a cold comfort. It was one he didn't want. It was the kind of comfort that the alien who had stolen him for five months would have given him, and it sat wrong. Because to Bucky, it did matter. He couldn't make things _not_ matter; nobody could. Nobody could make Steve not matter to him. Sometimes Steve was the only thing that made sense, the only thing that did matter, the north star Bucky could point his wandering soul toward. It wasn't good, it wasn't healthy for either of them, but some splinters you couldn't work out, no matter how hard you tried. Sometimes a piece of something else just stayed inside you your entire life. And sometimes it poisoned you. Sometimes it didn't.

"Bucky," Steve said, and Bucky jerked back to the present, looked at him. "Stay with me," Steve said, sliding his hand along the ridge of Bucky's hip, under the waistband of Bucky's underwear. He slipped his hand inside, wrapped it around Bucky's dick, stroked him slowly. Bucky arched his back and made a thin noise, turning his face, seeking Steve's mouth, frustrated when Steve wouldn't let him have it.

Instead Steve dragged his mouth along Bucky's jaw, biting the corner of it, and down his neck, sucking a tender bruise into the thin skin in a way that made Bucky's dick jump in his hand. His mouth was so hot against Bucky's cool skin, following a trail down Bucky's chest and stomach until he was half licking Bucky's dick and half his own fingers, as he pulled down Bucky's clinging, damp underwear with his other hand.

"Christ," Bucky said, putting his hand over his own eyes. Steve just teased him for a minute, mouthing and licking at him, touching every sensitive spot he knew how to find. He still had his hand wrapped around Bucky's cock loosely, and something about the feeling of his tongue flicking between his fingers got Bucky more worked up than Bucky knew how to explain.

Eventually Steve stopped teasing and sucked the head of Bucky's cock into his mouth, gradually sliding down, his hands shifting to hold Bucky's hips down against the bed. Bucky groaned, wrapping a leg around Steve, rubbing his toes along Steve's spine, curling and uncurling them. He felt Steve make a little noise around him, the vibration shaking another noise out of Bucky, too -- it was sort of a recursive loop, if you thought about it. The feedback amplifying itself.

It felt good. And it wasn't that Bucky just suddenly didn't know what he'd been afraid of, but it seemed stupid, now, to think that he could have fucked this up. It wasn't something you could break. He shuddered all over, feeling not for the first time like he was some kind of musical instrument and Steve was plucking all his strings at once. The wave, building inside him, except this time it wasn't fear, it was --

He shouted and came, without warning, in Steve's mouth. Steve's throat worked around him, and when Steve pulled off, wiping his mouth, he looked faintly surprised. "Jesus," Bucky said, "I'm sorry, I should have known, it's been a while."

"Why are you apologizing?" Steve said, crawling up between Bucky's legs, mouthing at the hard muscle of Bucky's stomach, his tongue tracing the lines of Bucky's obliques, the dip of Bucky's waist. Bucky reached for his hair, pulled him up, and kissed him, tasting himself in Steve's mouth, smelling the lake all over Steve.

"I want you to fuck me," he mumbled into Steve's mouth, and felt Steve's dick jerk, trapped between them, still separated from Bucky's skin by Steve's underwear. "C'mon," he said, sucking Steve's lower lip, biting it, pressing his tongue into Steve's mouth. Suddenly as hot and desperate for it as he could ever remember being, even as absurd as that seemed.

"Okay, okay," Steve said, breathless, when Bucky finally let him pull away enough. "Shit, I don't know where there's any --" he got up and stumbled out of the bedroom, into the bathroom. Bucky heard him rattling around, going through the cupboard and the medicine cabinet -- apparently somewhat violently, from the sound of it. He came back after a minute, flushed but victorious, holding the bottle.

Bucky laughed, shaking his head at Steve, putting his hands over his eyes for a second. "Don't you laugh at me," Steve said, climbing back onto the bed, grabbing one of Bucky's knees and maneuvering his legs apart. "I didn't have a goddamn idea where the last place I saw this was."

"I would have let you fuck me without it," Bucky said, and then didn't say much of anything at all because Steve's slick hand was sliding up his thigh, Steve's fingers pressing inside him. It had been -- christ, half a year, and it wasn't without a twinge of discomfort, but that had never mattered to Bucky. He hardly had the patience for it now, even though he'd just come. He put his foot against Steve's chest and pushed until Steve was sitting back, climbed into Steve's lap, and sank down onto him inch by inch.

Steve's hands were hot as brands on his hips, and Bucky panted, tipping his head back, feeling like he was some kind of molten metal himself, something for Steve to shape however he saw fit. His hair spilled ticklishly down his shoulders, still cooler than the rest of him, and he bucked his hips, grinding his dick forward against Steve's stomach, feeling Steve shifting inside him.

Steve planted his feet and thrust up into Bucky. Bucky shuddered all over with it, unable to imagine how he'd gone so long without. He was an idiot, he'd been an idiot -- Steve was right, you couldn't ruin this, there wasn't a chance in hell, and even if he hadn't been able to figure it out on his own he would have known it looking down into Steve's face. Looking at Steve's pink cheeks, the flush that spread all the way down to his chest, the way he couldn't quite keep his mouth closed all the way, and his tongue kept darting out to wet his lips. "Steve," said Bucky, and Steve put one hand in Bucky's hair and used it to pull Bucky into a kiss, swallowing up his own name out of Bucky's mouth.

Bucky didn't even know if it could really be called fucking -- neither of them was moving much. Steve was sort of lazily pushing up into him, and Bucky was rocking his hips, but -- he thought he might be able to come from this by itself, if it went on long enough. There was no way to describe this sort of slow burn. Like he was some kind of a grenade lit on an impossibly long fuse, or something. He just got hotter and hotter, a fire started from an ember, like a house burnt from the inside out, collapsing in itself.

He'd started to sweat a little where Steve's hands were on him, and he felt Steve's shift in movement the second before he processed it, just like he did when they were sparring. Steve flipped him onto his back, somehow managing to stay in him the entire time, and landed with Bucky's legs hitched up around his hips. One of his hands left Bucky's side, where it had slid around, and went to his face instead, brushing Bucky's hair back heavily, almost like Bucky was some kind of brushstroke and Steve was deliberately smearing him.

Steve kissed him again, and as he did, thrust into him, hard, punching a noise out of Bucky that was only half-muffled by Steve's mouth. He wrapped his hand around Bucky's knee and pushed it back against Bucky's shoulder, and his next thrust was even deeper. It made Bucky arch up off the bed, his spine curving. Like electricity, but in a good way. He almost didn't recognize the noises he was making, faintly realizing he maybe ought to be embarrassed by how loud he was being, but -- Steve didn't seem to mind, and there was nobody around --

Steve didn't last long in this position. Bucky could hear the change in his breath, and he buried his face against Bucky's shoulder and went tight and tense for what felt like a long time, and then half-collapsed, letting Bucky take most of his weight. Bucky grunted, his legs still hooked around Steve, and pushed up against him until Steve propped himself up on one elbow and slid his hand in between them, circling it firmly around Bucky's dick and jerking him until Bucky let out a thin cry and came again, toes curling.

When his wits came back to him, Bucky realized he'd gone so tense that he had a cramp in his thigh, and groaned, reaching down to knead it as he relaxed his leg. Steve lifted his head, looking vaguely amused, and Bucky said, "Don't say anything. I swear to god, don't you say anything."

"Nothing," Steve said. "I have nothing to say." He put his face back down against Bucky's chest and they lay there like that a while, until Steve finally sighed and said, "I'm not tired."

"No," Bucky said. "Me neither."

Steve sat up, and Bucky followed, reaching to smooth Steve's hair down where it was standing in uneven tufts. His own hair, he assumed, was pretty much a lost cause. Steve caught his hand after a minute, his thumb stroking over Bucky's knuckles. "Can I draw you?" he asked.

"Yeah," Bucky said, picking up his book where he'd set it aside on the nightstand. "How do you want me?"

"Just -- like that. That's good," Steve said, getting up, retrieving his sketchbook where it was sitting next to the watercolor pad. He shifted to the end of the bed, and his pencil started scratching over the paper without any further preamble. Bucky flipped open to the last page he'd finished and found his place, but really he was only half paying attention to the book. The other half of him was watching Steve draw. He wondered what Steve was seeing: He never could figure it out, until Steve had finished, and it always turned out better than expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took me longer than normal to write, and I am sorry for that, but I hope you enjoy it. Thank you to everyone who reads and comments - it's been a rough month at work and you guys keep me going. Come say howdy on [tumblr,](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com) if you are so inclined.


	7. lisichka

7.

The beach needed a lot of work. The hill down turned out to be somewhat unstable, which was probably why the stairs were falling down in the first place -- the sandy soil had eroded right out from underneath them. The sand was full of burrs and fish bones. Bucky spent almost a whole day just hauling branches and brush off the beach and burning it, and then going over and over the sand until he couldn't find any more burrs.

He kind of felt bad spraying for wasps the next day, watching them shrivel up and die when he hit them with the insecticide. But they were going to have to find someplace else to live. Having a bunch of hornets and yellowjackets swarming around wasn't conducive to any kind of enjoyment of the place, and with everything cleared away, it was a hell of a nice view. It deserved to be enjoyed.

The day after, he started tearing down the stairs. He wasn't sure exactly how he was going to build anything in their place, but they were an irretrievable mess, so they had to go. Most of the wood was rotting, and what seemed sound enough, he carried to the barn and set aside, maybe to re-use it. As he was walking back, grass tickling up around his bare ankles, he heard this sound -- like a baby crying or something, just this thin little cry.

He hurried back over to the edge of the bluff. "Hello?" he called, staring down. The cry persisted, but it sounded more like an animal, and as Bucky called "Hello?" again, a very small brown kitten rocketed out of the brush, tail puffy and back arched, and came flying across the beach.

It stopped in its tracks when it saw Bucky and sat down, staring up at him with big green eyes. Its mouth opened, and it meowed pathetically. "Hey," Bucky said. The kitten came forward and put its paws against the hill, and then jumped, a lot higher than Bucky would have thought possible for an animal that tiny. But it wasn't far enough; it just slid back down. The bank was too steep and the kitten was too small.

"Hold on, hold on," Bucky said. He turned around and scrambled down the bank himself, trying to avoid kicking sand and dirt -- or, god forbid, any rocks -- down onto the kitten. He landed right next to it, and they stared at each other for a second, the kitten with its ears pinned back, looking like it might run away.

"Hi, kitty," Bucky said. He held his right hand out, and the kitten's tail went straight up in the air. It sniffed his hand. Its nose was wet and its whiskers tickled. Bucky tentatively, slowly reached out to rub one finger against the top of its tiny head.

The kitten scrambled forward, climbed into Bucky's lap, and started purring so loud he could hear it as well as feel it. Its tiny claws flexed in the fabric of Bucky's shorts, and then it put its front paws up on Bucky's chest, sniffed his chin, and started butting its head against his face.

"You're so little," Bucky said. He wasn't sure if it'd let him pick it up, but when he closed his hand around its chest, it was complacent, albeit wiggly, and it weighed all of about two pounds. "How the hell did you even get down here?"

The kitten said _nyaaa_ in response, and Bucky glanced up the bank again. "All right," he said. "Let's get out of here." It was so skinny, just a sack of soft fur and bones. It probably needed to eat. He hoped it was old enough that it could eat real food, and not just milk.

He cradled it against his chest with his right hand and used his left to lever himself back up the side of the bank. Its claws were sunk into his shoulder by the time he got to the top -- it had climbed up to half-perch on his shoulder, peering around, its big ears swiveling. It kind of hurt, but it wasn't so bad; the kitten was still purring.

Bucky set it down, and it twined around his ankles, its tail held cheerfully in the air. "Okay," Bucky said. "Come with me, we're going to the house now."

 _Mee?_ said the kitten. It didn't follow Bucky when he started walking. "C'mon," he said again, and then sighed and picked it up instead. It squirmed, turning in toward his body, so he held it in the crook of his arm, walking as fast as he could manage without dislodging it. He hoped it didn't have fleas.

"Steve?" he said, coming in the front door, kitten trying to climb his arm. There wasn't an answer. "Steven?" he said, louder.

"I'm in here," Steve said from the back porch, and then, after a second, "What is it?"

Bucky went into the kitchen, set the kitten down on the floor, and opened the fridge. "I was painting," Steve said, coming in. "Sorry I didn't hear you the first time, I -- where did you get that?"

"It was down on the beach," Bucky said. "I don't know how it got down there. I don't think it could get back up."

Steve came over and crouched down. He was still holding a paintbrush, and he was in his underwear, unshaven, probably hadn't showered yet today. "It's tiny," he said, reaching out. He looked almost shy, and it was strangely charming -- like he was afraid of being rejected. The kitten didn't seem intimidated, though. It sniffed Steve's finger and then pushed first its head and then its whole body into the palm of Steve's hand. Bucky heard it start purring again as Steve petted it.

"I know," Bucky said. "It's really small. I don't know if we have anything it can eat. Do you know where the nearest vet is?"

"Probably Erie," Steve said, picking the kitten up, looking at it. "How old do you think it is?"

"Hell if I know," Bucky said. He reached into the fridge and pulled out some deli cold cuts, shredded them up small and put them on a plate, then set the plate on the floor. The kitten squirmed out of Steve's grasp and ran over to the plate. It sniffed and licked at the little pieces of meat, ate some of them, didn't really seem to know what to do with the rest. "We should take it to the vet," Bucky said. "We have to make sure it's not sick or something, you know."

"Yeah," Steve agreed. He rubbed his knuckle against the top of its head. Something about the scene made Bucky want to scream, maybe the way Steve just seemed mesmerized, maybe something a lot more complicated than that.

"Get dressed, then," Bucky said. "Did you even shower today?"

"No," Steve admitted. "Not yet." He glanced askance at Bucky. "Neither did you."

"I'm going to give it some water," Bucky said. He was almost afraid to leave it alone, and for the kitten's part, it seemed to want to rub against Steve and Bucky's ankles and not stray far enough from them to explore the house. "Are all the windows and doors closed?"

"Yeah, I think so," Steve said, straightening up. "Let me go make sure." He walked back out onto the porch, and then came back through on his way to the bedroom. Bucky poured a bowl of water and set it down. The kitten peered into it curiously for a moment, dipped a paw in, and then started to noisily drink.

Steve returned in shorts and a t-shirt, and Bucky switched out kitten-guarding duty to put on a shirt of his own. When he came back, Steve grabbed his keys in one hand and the kitten in another. "Hang on," Bucky said. "Give me that, you need both hands to drive."

The kitten seemed to have gotten sleepy, and rested in Bucky's hand limply, its eyes slipping shut. The second Steve started the truck, though, it came awake again, and as soon as the wheels started running, it squirmed in Bucky's hand, crying. "What's wrong?" Steve said, looking over in alarm.

"I don't know, why are you asking me?" Bucky said. The kitten clawed his arm and tried to squirm out of his grip. Eventually it was wriggling so hard that Bucky was afraid he was going to hurt it if he held on any tighter, so he let go. It immediately went to hide in the footwell, making pitiful noises, its eyes big and round. "Come on, come out of there," Bucky said, reaching down. The kitten shrank away. He hoped it didn't pee down there or something.

"Find the vet for me, will you?" Steve said. They were headed in the general direction of Erie, but it wasn't until Bucky had a signal on his phone that he could get anything more specific than that. When he did, he read off the address to Steve, and twenty-five minutes later they were walking into the vet's office, kitten in hand. The kitten had returned completely to normal as soon as the engine shut off. Bucky had no idea what had happened.

"Hello," the receptionist said. "How can I help you?"

"I found this kitten," Bucky said, holding it up demonstratively. "Uh, we -- wanted to make sure it wasn't sick, or anything, I guess."

"Okay," said the receptionist. "Let me have you fill out some paperwork." She started to offer it to Bucky, and Bucky glanced over his shoulder, jerking his chin at Steve, who came forward and took the kitten, which said _meee meee meee_ with its paws stretching toward Bucky. He felt guilty for a second.

The paperwork was mostly a lot of questions that Bucky had no idea how to answer, so he either wrote question marks or left them blank. The receptionist took them back to an exam room, and they sat there waiting while the kitten walked around and sniffed everything until Dr. Nguyen came in. "Good afternoon," she said, giving them a very dubious look and immediately reaching down to pick the kitten up and put it in a silver bucket that Bucky realized must be a scale. "So you found this kitten?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. "About an hour ago, I guess. We bought some property, and I was fixing the beach up, and it was down there. I don't know how it got there, but we figured we better bring it in and get it checked out."

"All right," Dr. Nguyen said. She felt the kitten all over, listened to its heart, lifted its tail up, shone a little penlight in its eyes, ears, and mouth -- a lot like you'd do a check-up on a person, really -- and then just petted it and played with it for a minute. "Well, I'll have to run a little bit of bloodwork on her to make sure, but it appears to me that what you have here is a healthy, if slightly underweight, ten-week-old female kitten. She's lucky that someone found her. Are you intending to keep her?"

Bucky glanced at Steve. "Uh," he said, "I don't know if it's -- a good idea --"

"I can send you to the shelter," Dr. Nguyen said, "but I'm going to be a hundred percent honest with you here: People around here drop kittens off on the side of the road all the time. The shelter's at capacity a lot of the time. Whatever you're thinking, she'd probably be better off with you."

Bucky and Steve exchanged looks -- Bucky didn't want to say yes without knowing Steve's thoughts, but he also didn't want to just dump the kitten off at a shelter where she might not even get a chance to be adopted. Dr. Nguyen could either read the silent conversation between them or she just didn't have a lot of patience for their bullshit. Either way, she cleared her throat and said, "If you're thinking about keeping her, we can schedule a spay for tonight, run all the bloodwork, get her vaccinations, and you can come pick her up tomorrow."

Bucky stared at the kitten. _Meeee!_ she said. She came over and sniffed Bucky's fingers, then rubbed her head against his knuckles. He looked at Steve one more time, and Steve shrugged helplessly, gesturing to the kitten. "Okay," Bucky said. "Okay, yeah, we can do that."

"Great," Dr. Nguyen said. "Do you want to give her a name? Or we can just call her 'kitten' on her paperwork, if you prefer."

"Penny," Bucky said immediately, not sure where he'd pulled it up from -- maybe her color, sort of like a tarnished penny, coppery but with dark stripes. "Call her Penny. What do you call this coat color, by the way?"

"She's a torbie," Dr. Nguyen said. "It's a mixture of tortoiseshell and tabby. I'll get Melissa to bring in your paperwork, and she'll get you some pamphlets on what you're going to need to know as first-time cat owners.

Bucky would have asked how Dr. Nguyen knew, but it was pretty obvious. They left the kitten, sadly meowing in her squeaky little voice, at the vet's office, and went out to the truck. "I guess we need to get some stuff," Steve said, looking through the pile of pamphlets the vet tech had given Bucky.

"Yeah," Bucky said. He ran a hand through his hair. "I mean -- are you okay with -- I don't know, it's not a good idea. We might have to leave anytime, or --"

"She's better off with us than she would be at the shelter," Steve said firmly. "Like the vet said. And she likes you, anybody could see that."

"She's a kitten," Bucky said. "She doesn't have any sense. Of course she likes me, I'm the one that found her and gave her food."

"Well, whatever the reason, she's better off with you," Steve said. "I think it'll be nice, having her around the house. Where's the nearest pet store?"

+++

They got kitten food, a cat bed, a litterbox, and drove home. "Shit," Bucky said, looking around the house. "We have to make this place cat-proof. What does that even mean?"

They divided the house and both of them went around trying to find anything that seemed like it could be dangerous if you were twelve inches long and weighed two pounds. Bucky spent the entire time trying not to think about the fact that cats lived for fifteen years and that he seemed to be incapable of imagining his life even six months in the future. Steve was right; the vet was right. Penny would be better off with them than she would starving to death, or getting hit by a car, or whatever else stray cats did around here.

When he and Steve picked her up the next day, she had a little cone around her neck and a shaved patch on her belly with some stitches. She seemed completely unphased by the fact that she had just had surgery, climbing on Bucky the second the vet tech let her out of the carrier. "Try and make sure she rests," the vet tech said, smiling. "The key word there being 'try.'"

She cried all the way home in the truck, but once Bucky set her down in the living room, she went and sniffed around at everything, then climbed up on the couch and fell asleep, her body curled in a tiny circle, her tail tucked over her nose.

"Okay," said Bucky, looking at her.

"Okay," Steve agreed, from beside him.

+++

Penny settled into their lives almost naturally, strangely enough -- like she belonged there. She wasn't much trouble, really; she ran around the house like a crazy thing for periods of about an hour at a time, flying through doors, leaping onto tables and furniture, pouncing on any loose scrap of paper she could find, and then fell asleep. The cat bed turned out to be useless. She preferred to sleep with Steve and Bucky, and as afraid as Bucky was that he was going to roll over and squish her in the night, he never did.

Probably the biggest challenge was keeping her out of Steve's art supplies. She was curious as hell, and while she seemed to prefer Bucky on principle, she and Steve had a hilariously charming relationship involving shyly dancing around each other to the point of ridiculousness. She would creep into the room with Steve and sit watching him for a while, and then when he was least expecting it, she'd scramble up his leg and go for his paintbrush, or jump straight onto his sketchbook. Eventually they started keeping the porch door closed when Steve was out there painting. For a while, Bucky tried keeping a bell tied on Penny, but she hated it, and with the way she went careening around the house, it was more annoying than it was useful.

It took him about a week and a half to figure out how he was going to re-do the stairs. He ended up having to drive down to Conneaut's public library to use their internet, and sat there for a few hours poring over various home-improvement sites. And then, of course, there were the trips to the hardware store to get what he needed -- wood, metal, wire mesh to put in place to keep the bank from eroding further.

He spent a whole day just making a drawing of it, complete with measurements and everything. It was going to be a two-person job, so he'd have to enlist Steve's help, and it wouldn't do to just be trying to explain his mental image to Steve. It was kind of funny, too -- he could draw things like this fine, structures that were just lines and measurements and correct angles. When he understood it in his head, it was fairly easy to put it down on paper. Really it was more math than anything. But the sort of things Steve did, the way Steve's mind worked when he was drawing -- that was still a total mystery.

The full heat of summer was upon them now. It got up to the high eighties at least, in the mid-afternoon, and Bucky couldn't blame Steve when Steve, sweating one day as they lay down the mesh and dug it into the ground, turned to him and said, "I think this was probably a terrible time of year to do this."

"What, would you rather do it in the winter when there's snow on the ground?" Bucky asked, taking off his work gloves and wiping the back of his hand against his forehead.

"No," Steve said, shooting him a look. "You know what I mean. Just -- jesus, it's hot."

Bucky gestured down toward the water. "So go cool off," he said.

Steve glanced between Bucky and the lake, and then he nodded, decisively, stripping off his gloves, his shorts, and his underwear, and wading right in. Bucky watched him get in the water about up to mid-thigh and then dive forward, swimming out a little and coming up where it was deeper. The day was sunny, and the lake sparkled with reflections. Steve almost looked like a mirage, from this angle.

Bucky tossed his own work gloves aside, pulling his shorts and underwear off as he went down the beach. The water was almost shockingly cold against the hot air, but once he was in, it felt like _relief_. He swam out to Steve, ducked underwater to pull one of Steve's ankles out from under him, and then dodged as Steve tried to retaliate.

There was a brief scuffle that involved a lot of splashing and swearing, and then they just floated next to each other for a while. "This is nice," Steve said.

"Yeah," Bucky agreed. The cool water lapped around him, and the sun beat down from above, warming his face.

"Those fucking stairs," Steve said.

"Come on," Bucky said, reaching over and splashing him a little, in the face. "What would people say if they knew Captain America was such a goddamn whiner, huh? You're so big and strong now and you can't even handle a few days of hard labor?"

"Shut up," Steve said, splashing Bucky back. "The painting was fine, you know that. This is a whole other ballpark. I don't know how the hell you came up with this plan in the first place."

"Internet," Bucky said. "God, you used to be like this too, I remember. It'd start getting real hot out and all of a sudden it'd be 'Bucky, do this, Bucky, do that, I think my asthma's acting up, all this heat.'"

"I was not!" Steve said. "I hated asking you for anything, if you recall. And it wasn't the heat, it was the humidity. It felt like breathing soup."

Bucky smiled at him. "I know," he said. "I’m giving you a hard time." He shifted, sighing, and started to wade back toward shore. "All right, c'mon," he said. "We just need to finish this last row of terracing and then we can be done for the day."

Steve followed him in, and they both put their shorts and gloves back on and got to work again. "Christ, you used to sweat, though," Bucky said. "I remember _that._ I think you sweated out half your body weight just walking around Coney Island with me that one time."

"Oh yeah, I remember that too," Steve said.

"I kept asking you if you wanted to go home," Bucky said.

"Yeah, you did," Steve said. "But you were having a good time, and I was having a good time with you, even though I thought I was going to pass out."

"Wouldn't have been the first time," Bucky said.

"No," Steve said. He laughed, tipping his head back. "It wouldn't."

They finished the row of terracing. By then, the sun was starting to sink lower in the sky, turning the clouds a sort of dreamy creamsicle orange, the sky to reds and purples, so they sat and watched the sunset from the beach. It was beautiful. That was the thing, about these fleeting moments; the impermanence of them was beautiful. They happened once and they could never be replicated, and part of their loveliness was that you only knew how beautiful they were if you experienced them.

When the big vermilion ball of the sun had dipped beneath the horizon, they got in the water one more time and rinsed off, and Steve said, "I like watching you watch things like that," and kissed Bucky.

"What," Bucky said, smoothing his hands over Steve's wet hair, rubbing his thumb against the sunburnt bridge of Steve's nose. "You can tell I'm getting maudlin over the sunset?"

Steve laughed. "Not maudlin," he said. "You just get this soft look in your eyes. I don't know how to describe it. I like it. I've never seen it look quite the same on anybody else."

"I love you," Bucky said, abruptly, mostly apropos of nothing, feeling slightly ridiculous.

"I know," Steve said, and kissed him again. They got out of the water as it got darker, and walked back to the house. Bucky poured himself a glass from the tap, and Steve got out a beer and cracked it open. One way or another they ended up kissing again, kissing that led to sex, first in the kitchen and then in the bedroom. Afterwards Steve fell straight asleep, and Bucky lay next to him, his face pressed against Steve's shoulder. He smelled Steve's skin -- the beach, the lake, sunscreen -- and felt the strangest feeling.

It took him a minute to figure out what the feeling was, but the second he did, he realized why it seemed so strange: He felt almost safe.

+++

By the end of the week, they'd finished the terracing and had gotten the basic framework of the stairs up, enough to make them look like they were supposed to, but certainly not enough that Bucky would trust them in a million years to hold his or Steve's weight -- or even Penny's, really.

The work probably could have gone faster, but since that first day, it had been steadily derailed by the both of them stripping off when they got too hot and jumping into the water. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes, and then once they'd cooled down they got back to work. Sometimes they ended up swimming around for an hour or two. It was okay; Bucky figured they weren't in any real hurry. The stairs were more a matter of convenience than anything else.

They were in the water one afternoon; Steve had just thrown a handful of sand at Bucky, and Bucky had dodged it, laughing, and splashed Steve in return. It would have probably escalated into some kind of wrestling match, except that Bucky suddenly heard the sound of someone coming through the trees at the top of the bluff.

He went into high-alert mode immediately, looking for the nearest thing he could use as a weapon, and felt Steve go stiff beside him. But then Natasha melted out of the shadow. "Are you _skinnydipping?_ " she said. "That's a great way to get a urinary tract infection, you know. The bacterial count in that water is probably pretty high. Although I guess you two don't have to worry about that."

Steve glanced at Bucky with an expression of surprise, and Bucky shrugged -- he hadn't known she was coming either. "These stairs don't look like they'd hold the weight of a child," Natasha said, and folded her arms.

Bucky climbed out of the water, undoing his hair and squeezing water out of it, picking up his underwear from where he'd thrown them on the beach. "They're not done yet," he said, turning to look over his shoulder at Steve again. "We were taking a break."

"Yeah, looks like it," Natasha said. She was looking at Steve, who was clearly torn between trying to stay in the water and wait her out and just giving up. Bucky could throw him his underwear and save him his scrap of dignity, but then he'd just end up getting them wet, and wet underwear was distinctly unpleasant even in the heat of summer. Eventually Steve came out of the water too, looking flustered and pink as he went over and got his underwear. Not that he had anything to be ashamed of, but that didn't matter much to Steve -- or most people, really -- in these circumstances.

"You weren't kidding," Natasha said. "It wasn't Photoshop."

"I told you it wasn't," Bucky said. Her tone was light, but only superficially; she wasn't happy with him, and was probably only pretending for the sake of keeping up some kind of facade, maybe for Steve, although she didn't need to. Especially not when she was making jokes at Steve's expense.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, starting up the terraced side of the bank, which was easier to climb now that it wasn't just loose dirt.

"Well, the two of you decided to take such a nice vacation from reality," Natasha said breezily. "I just had to see what this was all about. It's _very_ quaint."

Bucky snorted. "Fuck off," he said.

" _You_ fuck off," Natasha snapped in return. "Oh wait: You already did."

She turned on her heel and started back toward the house. Bucky spared Steve a glance, holding up a hand to forestall Steve following them, and went after her. She yanked him behind a particularly large tree and stood staring at him, her mouth pinched, her eyes wildly angry. "I almost want to slap you," she said. "I could slap you, you know."

"Go ahead," said Bucky, and she did, hard. He didn't react except to blink, and after a minute she shook her head, laughing, and backed away a little.

"I knew I wouldn't feel any better," she said.

"I guess it was worth a shot," Bucky said in response. "Listen, Natasha, I know why you're mad at me, and I --"

"You don't _get_ it, do you?" she interrupted, drawing herself up to her full height, chin upturned, just like Steve when he was about to make a pronouncement. "I get it. I understand why you had to leave. I know what it's like to feel like everyone's watching you at your most vulnerable, James. I even understand why you didn't want to see me, but just because you didn't want to doesn't mean it's okay that you just left like that!"

"I know," Bucky said. "I know, I know, I'm sorry." She stared at him defiantly and after a minute he grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her against himself. "I was really fucked up," he said.

"Past tense?" she asked. Her arms came up around him, her small hands flattening against his shoulderblades.

"Past, present, future, I don't know," Bucky said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you, _lisichka_."

"You didn't mean not to," Natasha said, pulling away. "I bet you get away with that a lot, don't you? You just say you're sorry, and people forgive you. It's not going to be that easy with me."

"I didn't expect it to be," Bucky said. She started toward the house, and he followed her. Steve was standing near the porch, looking poleaxed. Bucky didn't particularly want to guess how much of the conversation he'd heard.

Steve pulled the door open, and Natasha went in. Bucky and Steve exchanged glances briefly, and Bucky shook his head; he'd explain later, if there was anything even worth explaining.

Penny came flying around the corner when she heard Bucky and Steve come in, but the second she caught sight of Natasha, she puffed up to about twice her normal size -- which was still pathetic -- and hissed, her ears pinning back.

"Are you serious," Natasha said. "You _really_ went all the way down-home, didn't you. Where did this come from?"

"I found her," Bucky said.

Natasha crouched down slowly, and extended her hand. Penny de-puffed after about thirty seconds and crept over sideways until she was in sniffing range of Natasha's fingers. "This makes me so mad," Natasha said. "This is so cute. It's awful. You have a kitten."

"The vet said people dump them out in the country a lot around here. Her name's Penny. She’s a torbie." Bucky watched Penny decide Natasha wasn't a threat and rub against her, starting up a thrumming purr when Natasha scratched her chin. "You didn't answer my question, you know."

"Sure I did," Natasha said.

"No you didn't," said Bucky.

Natasha sighed and straightened up, looking him in the eye. "Believe it or not, the world has gone on while the two of you have been out here playing happy homemakers," she said. "And I don't know if you're just content to believe that thing that had you is gone, or if you know something I don't, but I'm not exactly satisfied with the idea that it just _disappeared._ "

The bottom dropped out of Bucky's stomach, and he found himself gripping the kitchen counter, while Steve rounded on Natasha. "What do you mean?" he said. "What are you talking about?"

"I mean, we still have no idea why it was here, what it was looking for, and why it left," Natasha said. "And besides that, all evidence points toward the fact that it's still alive." She gave Bucky a pointed look, which he could barely parse around the sound of his own pulse pounding in his ear. "And if that's the case, I'd really rather it not be."

"How do you kill something without a body," Steve mused.

"I don't know," Natasha said. "But there's somebody here who might." She tilted her head toward Bucky, and when Steve took a second to look at Bucky, his expression turned to one of alarm. He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and made Bucky sit down.

"It's gone," Bucky said, putting his head in his hands. "It's gone, it has to be, it has to --"

"The only way we're ever going to know that for sure is if we kill it," Natasha said. "Or if we can't do that, we can at least make sure it's very far away from here."

Steve was staring at Bucky, and Natasha said, "Look at him. It's not going to get better for him, for any of us, until we know it's finished. And I know you have to want it dead just as much as I do. Probably more."

Penny came over and rubbed against Bucky's legs, saying _Mee! Mee, mee!_ but Bucky couldn't even reach down to pet her. He was dizzy, breathing shallowly through his mouth, stars at the edges of his vision. "Bucky!" Steve said, and walked over, knelt beside him. "Bucky, it's okay. It's not here. It's not here. It's just us."

"Christ," Bucky managed, sliding his gaze over to Natasha when he could talk again. "If this was you getting back at me, it's a hell of a way to do it."

Natasha snorted. "You know me better than that," she said, and then sighed, kicking off her shoes and looking around. "This place has two bedrooms, right? I looked up the model online."

"Well," Steve said. Truth was, the second bedroom didn't have a bed at all; they'd set it up more as a studio, and while Steve had been painting on the porch while the weather was nice, it was filled with canvases and paints.

"Okay," Natasha said. "I'll take the couch, then."

"I think there's a Motel Six or something, down the road," Steve said. "It might be more comfortable, the couch isn't very big --"

"Come on, Rogers," Natasha said. "The couch is fine. I've slept in worse places."

"I bet," Bucky said. He remembered sleeping in the corner of an empty warehouse, once, using a pile of old newspapers as blankets. It had been the dead of winter. He couldn't leave the warehouse without risking giving up his position. He was sure Natasha had a hundred similar stories, and, truthfully, that was one of the more benign ones. Neither of them had a particularly kind past.

Maybe that was why she was here. Kindred spirits, and all that. "I'm starving," she said, sitting down next to Bucky at the kitchen table. "I drove all day. What do you have to eat in this place?"

+++

Steve and Bucky made dinner and they all sat around the kitchen table eating it quietly. The light got longer, that surreal, syrupy late-summer evening haze, turning the house all gold and rose. After they ate, Steve took all the dishes over to wash them, and Bucky poured himself and Natasha each a couple fingers of whiskey.

They went out onto the porch, and then Natasha stepped out into the rapidly-cooling evening air, walking away from the house a little bit. The sunset turned her hair to fire and her eyes almost yellow as she gazed out at the horizon.

"I shouldn't have slapped you earlier," she said, taking a drink from her glass, the ice clinking against the side.

Bucky shrugged. "I deserved it," he said.

"Yes," she agreed, "you did, but I shouldn't have done it. I wanted to be better than that."

Bucky laughed. "We all want to be better," he said. "Turns out it's harder in practice than it seems. Steve's the only one that I've seen manage it."

"And we love him for it," Natasha said. She walked further over, across the lawn which needed to be cut again, and sat down at the edge of the bank. Bucky went after her, and sat down too. They were silent for a while as the sun meandered down toward the lake. "Was it all bullshit?" she asked eventually.

"What?" Bucky said.

"All the stuff you said to me," Natasha said. "You know what I mean. 'Not everyone else thinks you're a bad person, it gets easier over time'. Do you even believe yourself?"

"I wouldn't lie to you," Bucky said.

Natasha laughed. "I don't even think you realize when you're lying to yourself sometimes."

"Jesus, you're mean when you want to be," Bucky said. "No, all right? It wasn't all bullshit. All of the -- it's just. I believed what I was saying when I said it, okay? Just because I can't -- follow my own fucking advice --" he found himself getting overwrought for a minute and yanked on his own hair, pulling his fingers through it.

Natasha reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. "It's just too hard to unlearn," Bucky said miserably. "Everything -- every moment you learn that if you don't suck it up and take it then somebody else is going to have to, every time somebody's looking down on you because you cracked a little, every time you disappoint somebody, it's -- it all piles up, and you want to let go of it, but you can't."

Natasha didn't say anything, but she scooted closer and rested her head on his shoulder after a minute. The sun had gone down, and the light had shifted, shading everything purple now. "Everything was good, you know," Bucky said. "It was okay here."

"No it wasn't," Natasha said. "You know it wasn't."

"It felt like it was," Bucky said. He sighed. "So you want to find this thing, somehow, and kill it."

" _I_ want to?" Natasha said. "Don't you want to?"

"I don't really want anything to do with it ever again," Bucky said. "But -- I want to not be afraid of it coming back, too, so I guess -- yeah, I guess so."

When they went back in the house, Steve was standing on the porch, arms folded; he must have been watching them. Bucky took Natasha's empty glass and went into the kitchen to rinse them out. Steve came up beside him after a moment and put his hand on Bucky's lower back. Bucky turned into his arms, and they kissed. "Are you okay?" Steve said after a minute, quietly, his words buzzing against Bucky's mouth.

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Yeah, I'm all right."

Steve pulled back for a second, his hands on Bucky's face, looking into his eyes. He had been turned golden-tan by the sun, rosy with sunburn on his cheeks and nose, and with his hair lightened to a sort of straw-blonde, Bucky didn't know if he'd ever seen Steve look more impossibly perfect. "Okay," he said, and kissed Bucky again.

Bucky was aware of Natasha watching them from the doorway, but he found he didn't particularly care. He pulled away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand when Steve was done kissing him, and turned to face her. "You're probably gonna want a blanket, aren't you," he said. "Let me get you one."

He pulled some sheets out of the linen closet and brought them down to the living room, where Natasha was walking around looking at their stuff. "Penny might bounce around on you a little bit in the night, but she usually sleeps with us," he said.

"Okay," Natasha said, taking the pile of blankets. "Thank you. Goodnight."

"Help yourself to anything you want, if you're up before us," Bucky said. "G'night."

Steve was already upstairs, sitting on the bed, flipping through his sketchbook. He looked up when Bucky came in. "Were you jealous?" Bucky said. "You were watching us."

"I don't know," Steve said, sounding peevish and a little embarrassed.

"You don't get like that with Pepper," Bucky said.

"I know," Steve said. "I know, it's -- I don't know what it is, Buck." He closed his sketchbook. "Are you sure you're gonna be okay with this?"

Bucky laughed. "No," he said. "Every time I think about it for too long I want to pass out. But she wants it, and she's right that nobody's safe until we know it's dead."

"I want to kill it too," Steve said. "For you. For what it did to you -- to us."

"Yeah," Bucky said. He sat down in bed too, and sighed, running his hand through his hair. "And I want it dead too. It's just -- I'm scared."

Steve nodded, his brow furrowing. They sat in silence for a minute, and then Steve got up. He kissed Bucky's forehead. "I'm going to rinse off," he said. "If you're still awake when I come back, I could rub your back for you, or something."

"Okay," Bucky said, smiling slightly. He lay back, picking up Steve's sketchbook and flipping through the latest few pages, all the different iterations of sunsets, from the bold to the delicate. He heard the shower turn on, and he was half-asleep already when Steve came back in, smelling like soap, warm and clean. Steve moved his sketchbook off to the side and climbed in with Bucky, gently coaxing Bucky over onto his stomach. And then his hands touched Bucky, gently at first; it felt like he was measuring Bucky, or mapping him somehow.

Bucky groaned when the touches became more deliberate. Steve’s backrubs started, unlike Natasha’s had that one time, with specific muscle groups, finding the worst place and digging right into it. But gradually the knotted muscle relaxed, and as it did, Bucky found himself relaxing too, until he drifted off to sleep, without really noticing he was doing it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Lisichka" means "little fox" in Russian. Coincidentally, it was also the name of a Soviet space dog.
> 
> Thank you for reading! I'm also on [tumblr](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com) drawing a lot of shirtless Buckys, if such a thing strikes your fancy.


	8. sympathetic resonance

8.

He woke up the next morning with Steve's arms around him and Steve's hard dick pressing against the small of his back. He could tell Steve was awake, somehow, and he barely had time to say "yeah, okay," and shunt a disgruntled Penny off the bed before Steve was all over him.

He had to rinse off after that, and when he went downstairs, he smelled coffee; he'd almost forgotten Natasha was here at all, but there she was, standing on the porch, looking out toward the lake. She turned to glance at him, eyebrow raised, her coffee mug steaming in the cool morning air. "Good morning," she said.

"Morning," Bucky said, pulling a mug down for himself and one for Steve, getting out a cupful of kitten food for Penny, who came careening down the stairs and into the kitchen after him.

Steve had rinsed off too. He came down some ten minutes after Bucky, in his underwear, skin pink from the shower. Bucky passed him his mug of coffee, and Steve kissed him and gave him a heated look, even though they'd _just_ done it, jesus christ. "You want eggs?" Bucky asked him.

"Poached?" Steve said plaintively, and Bucky almost laughed, because Steve only asked for poached eggs when he thought he could get away successfully with making Bucky do all that work, which wasn't often. But apparently the orgasm he'd given Bucky had made him bold, or he was just feeling lucky.

"All right," Bucky said. "Poached. Bacon, too?"

"I'll do the bacon," Steve said. "And toast." He raised his voice a little. "Natasha?"

"What?" Natasha said, still from the other room.

"You want breakfast?" Steve asked.

"Just coffee is fine for now," Natasha said. She did come in and watch them, though, and Bucky felt it was only through sheer good fortune that he managed not to fuck up the poached eggs with her staring at him. They turned out perfect, though, fluffy and round, and when they sat down to eat, Steve gave a sigh of appreciation as he cut one open and the yolk spilled out onto his toast.

Natasha started looking testy halfway through the meal, but she waited for them to mostly finish before she launched into the mission. "I think the best way to start," she said to Bucky, "is for you to write down everything you remember. That way I can cross-reference locations, events, dates, and maybe we'll come up with some kind of pattern."

Bucky still had his mouth full of toast. "You know we don't even have internet out here," Steve said.

"The fact that you haven't been answering e-mails personally for the last two months kind of clued me in, yes," Natasha said. She went out to her car and came back with a small case full of electronic equipment, and started setting it all up, and when she was done, she'd created some kind of portable wireless hotspot in their house, a little black box with the familiar blue-flickering lights of a piece of Stark tech.

"I kind of liked not having internet," Bucky said.

"That's because you're old," Natasha said mildly. She unfolded her laptop. "If you had been checking your e-mail, at least you'd know that your lawyer has managed to talk you out of litigation and into settlement. I don't know how she did it; I sat in on some of the proceedings as a proxy and they really wanted blood."

Bucky sighed, running his hands over his face. "Blood or money," he said.

"Blood," Natasha said. "Definitely blood, in this case. But there was a legal precedent set with Clint and a few others from the Chitauri attack; I think they ended up subpoenaing Tony, and they used some footage that JARVIS had recorded, as well as CCTV footage from some of the actual incidents, to establish lack of culpability due to mind control." At Bucky's alarmed look, she said, "I know, but don't worry: The only three people that saw the footage were your lawyer, the prosecutor, and the judge."

It was still three people too many -- that should have been _private_ , Bucky thought. "I'm sure they did what they had to do," he said.

"Yes, you sound tremendously comforted," Natasha said dryly, tapping at her keyboard for a minute, and then looking up at Bucky and Steve. Steve had been suspiciously silent this whole time; he was clutching his coffee mug so hard Bucky was afraid it might spontaneously combust. "We can do this one of two ways," she said. "Either you write it down and I'll put it together, or you dictate to me."

"I'm," Bucky said. "I think I'm going to go -- sit outside, I'll write it down. I'll bring it back in." He banged out through the porch, picking up a pad of Steve's newsprint and a pencil, and went out into the backyard where the air didn't feel quite so close. He went over and sat, not on the bank, but a ways off, on the little spit of land he'd jumped off that night a couple of weeks ago, his legs dangling over the point.

He opened the sketchpad and flipped past a few loose, gestural drawings of himself -- just thick lines indicating shape and movement -- to a blank page. He'd been working so hard to suppress all of this, to push it back where he wouldn't have to live with it looming large over everything he did. Leave it to Natasha to come barging in and undo all of that in less than a day, even if he knew he had to face it eventually.

He held the pencil in his right hand, then his left, switching back and forth. He didn't know where to start. It was all such a jumbled mess. After a while he just started writing whatever came to mind, with no real rhyme or reason, until he'd filled up a page. He started on another, and as he was writing, he felt Steve coming up behind him -- it was very clearly Steve, although he didn't know how he could be so certain.

Steve sat down next to him and didn't say a word. Bucky started to run out of stuff to write, after a while, and he sighed, putting the pencil aside. "It's for the best," he said.

"I hope you're right," Steve said, picking up one of the pages where Bucky had been weighing them down with a rock. Bucky laughed. "What?" Steve asked.

"I think that's supposed to be my line," said Bucky.

+++

By late afternoon, they were all exhausted. It didn't feel like they'd accomplished much. Unlike Bucky's memories of being the Winter Soldier, where the mission information -- location, target, and so on -- had been cut and dry, this was all just splashes of information often with no identifying characteristics at all.

"This is a mess," said Natasha tiredly. They had printed out a bunch of stuff and it had been arranged on the table into what small semblance of order they had come up with.

"You're telling me," said Bucky. Beside him, Steve had his chin in one hand, and the fingers of the other were idly flipping through a bunch of printed frames from a street camera that had recorded Bucky in Reykjavik. It reminded Bucky of Steve during a particularly long briefing with Colonel Phillips that had turned into more of a session of Philips and Stark arguing with each other and, later, with a French liaison officer.

Natasha sighed and closed her laptop. "Please tell me there's anything at all to do around here besides home improvement projects and skinny-dipping," she said.

"Not really," Bucky said, exchanging a look with Steve. "I mean, we moved out to the middle of nowhere, that's kind of the point."

Natasha's mouth flattened out into an unamused line, and Steve said, "Well, we can always go into town and get dinner, if you want."

"Yes, please," Natasha said. "I need to get out of this house for a while. I don't know how the two of you stand it."

"Hey," said Bucky, offended. She rolled her eyes at him, and he shook his head at her in response. "There's been plenty to do around here making this place livable," he said, getting up to head upstairs so he could change into something that wasn't just sweatpants. He heard Steve telling Natasha they'd slept on a mattress in the living room for a month, and Natasha's bewildered laugh, as he climbed the stairs.

They piled into the truck and drove down into Conneaut, to the restaurant that sat over the harbor. With the three of them there, Bucky had a feeling that they were more recognizable -- Natasha had been on the news a lot after Project Insight, and she hadn't changed a lot since then. Her red hair was like a banner of pride, in a way -- she'd sacrificed her anonymity knowingly, after all. But it also made her stand out the most, of the three of them.

Nobody said anything, anyway. The waitstaff seemed to be a strange mixture of tired fifty-year-old women and bored teenagers, and there wasn't anything particularly nice to say about the service, other than that they did eventually get their food. Afterward they drove down to the marina and parked to watch the sun set out past the lighthouse and all the tied-up boats.

"So this is what you've been doing," Natasha said.

"Jesus christ," Bucky said, exasperated, watching the way Steve jerked around to face him at just his tone of voice. "Yes, this is what we've been doing. What I've been doing. I wasn't getting any better in the city, all right? I was barely keeping my head above water. So I came out here so I could have something else to focus on other than what other people were thinking about me. You're a smart girl. I'm sure you're familiar with the concept."

"Oh, I'm familiar with the concept," Natasha said. "I just don't get it. I know you, and it doesn't seem like you, giving up. And worse --" she lifted her chin, indicating Steve, who was standing a couple feet away with his arm folded, lit up orange by the setting sun, "Worse, it _definitely_ doesn't seem like him."

Steve looked at her dispassionately. "Well, I love him," he said, eventually. "So I guess my pride was just less important than needing him to feel better."

"That's what scares me," Natasha said quietly, her voice barely audible above the sound of the waves lapping at the dock. "Because I know that both of you had to _know_ this thing could still be out there, and -- you'd pick each other over the potential safety of all the rest of us." She looked at Bucky, her gaze steady but maybe slightly sad. "I think you're the only one in the world that could make him do that, you know."

"I didn't make him do anything," said Bucky, but it didn't mean what she was saying was less true. Maybe that was what he'd really been running from, that knowledge. He _hoped_ that if it came down to it, Steve would let him go. But he knew, somewhere deep in his soul where the splinter had wedged itself, that he wouldn't.

"The house is nice," Natasha said. "It's -- kind of annoying, actually, how well the two of you fit into this -- whatever it is. But you can't just leave the world to fend for itself when you're probably the only one who knows anything about what that thing is and how it works."

"I already said I'd help you!" said Bucky. "What else are you trying to get out of me?"

"Just tell me you know," Natasha said. She turned to look at Steve. "And you, too."

Steve smiled wanly. "I learned a long time ago that I didn't just get to stop being Captain America when it felt inconvenient," he said.

She looked back at Bucky then, and he sighed, running his hands through his hair. "I know," he said. "Of course I know."

For a long minute she just stared at him, and then she nodded. "All right," she said. "Then let's go back to the house."

+++

The problem, of course, was that Bucky _didn't_ know what the alien -- or whatever it was -- had wanted. Communication between them hadn't exactly been a two-way street. And considering that it had seemed to be operating on a different level from humanity entirely, it wasn't like he could apply any kind of rules of human behavior; hell, he couldn't even assign it the idea of a human goal. Maybe it hadn't wanted anything.

"Of course it wanted something," Natasha said tiredly. "We just can't figure out what."

Bucky rubbed his eyes. The days always seemed to end like this. They'd come across a reasonable theory or an idea and chase it down into what was, inevitably, a dead-end. Bucky found it frustrating enough; Steve, who despised inaction and repetition, seemed to be slowly, quietly losing his mind. It was subtle. Bucky wouldn't have noticed, if he didn't know what to look for.

"Fuck it," he said. "I'm gonna clean that fish and get dinner started. Steve, get a bottle of wine and put it in the fridge." He got up and went to pull out the perch they'd bought that morning in town, from some guy who was hauling it out of his little boat, got out the knife and cutting board, and watched Steve heading to the basement to get the wine.

"White," he called to Steve.

Steve turned to look at him from the top of the stairs. "I know you drink white with fish," he said. "Come on."

"I could throw this at you," Bucky said, holding up a handful of fish guts. "Just get the wine."

Steve returned with a couple of bottles - they were accumulating them, somehow. There were a lot of local wineries in the area, and every time Steve went out for groceries, he seemed to come back with another one. "Put it in the fridge," Bucky muttered, and Steve did, and then came over to kiss him despite the fact that the kitchen, and probably Bucky, smelled fishy as hell. "Stop distracting me and go turn on the grill," he said, muffled by Steve's mouth.

Steve gave him a look. "What is this, boredom makes you horny now?" Bucky asked. "I'm serious, you keep it up with the wandering hands and I'm going to accidentally slice a finger off. You can nail me to the bed _later_ , I'm trying to make dinner right now."

Natasha snorted from the dining room, and Bucky craned his neck to glance at her. "What?" he said. "Okay, _you_ start the grill, then."

She probably could have, but she didn't, likely because Bucky had told her to. It didn't matter; Steve went out after a minute and did it, and Bucky took the fish out when he was finished gutting and de-boning them. They sat on the porch, ate, and made their way through the two bottles of wine mostly in silence. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence, just worn-out.

"We need a new set of eyes on this," Bucky said eventually. The sun had gone down, and now they were just sitting there in darkness; Penny had come and climbed onto his lap halfway through dinner, begging for scraps, and had fallen asleep shortly thereafter. "I don't know what else I can give this, other than what's already there."

"It's been less than a week," Natasha said.

"Yeah, and in that week we've gotten nowhere," Bucky answered. "We need somebody who knows more about this kind of stuff."

"About aliens?" Natasha said, raising an eyebrow. "We could get ahold of Thor."

"I don't know," Bucky said. "We just need somebody who's -- smarter than us."

"Tony," Steve said immediately, and Bucky glanced at him, a little surprised. "Tony's the smartest person any of us knows," he said. "And even if he can't figure it out, I'm sure he knows somebody who can."

"Are you kidding?" Natasha laughed. "If he can't figure it out he'll probably drive himself crazy trying rather than admit defeat." She sat up, setting her wine glass aside with a clink. "Steve's right. We should pass it to Tony."

Bucky blew out a breath. "Okay," he said. As little as he liked the idea of giving some of this information to Tony, he also knew that Tony would be far less interested in the personal implications about Bucky or Bucky's state of mind than he would about figuring out whatever challenge they gave him. "Although I still don't know what kind of good it's really going to do, when we don't even know what we're looking for."

Natasha shrugged. "We tell him we're looking for a pattern. That'll be enough -- trust me, it'll be enough. It's already personal for him. All he needs is a call to action."

She got up and went back out into the living room, and Bucky heard the sound of her fingers clicking on the keyboard of her laptop. Steve looked over at Bucky, his eyes glinting in the low light, and licked his lips. "Oh, I didn't forget about you," Bucky said, reaching over and running the toes of one foot up Steve's calf, and then hooking the leg of his chair and dragging him closer. "Although if you think this is a reward for the fact that you didn't fall asleep or have some kind of outburst earlier when I made you sort those papers, I think we might have to have a conversation."

Steve laughed. "Some kind of outburst?" he said.

"You act like I don't know you," Bucky said, grinning,

"Can the two of you keep it in your pants at least until I'm done typing this e-mail?" said Natasha from the other room.

+++

That was how Tony Stark ended up in rural Pennsylvania.

Well, really it started with Skype -- endless Skype sessions. Bucky could hardly stand staring at a computer screen for more than an hour or two at a time before he had to rest his eyes, but for Tony, this all seemed more natural than breathing. Tony held conversations over the internet as casually as if they were all in the same room and not miles and miles apart.

There were always multiple cameras following him around the lab. One was, of course, his tablet, and some of them were obviously JARVIS -- the ones that would pan out to show wider expanses of environment. Some of them, Bucky just couldn't figure out. Even knowing as he did that there had been cameras watching them everywhere they went in the tower, understanding the full extent of it through Tony's use of them was slightly disturbing, like an itch just under the skin.

Natasha had been right about Tony's -- competitive zest for solving problems, if you could even call it that. The only person Tony was really competing with was himself, yet he seemed profoundly driven to beat himself to the solution anyway. This manifested itself as some truly unreadable mathematical formulas that Bucky couldn't figure out, and several complex graphs that he couldn't parse.

Tony's explanations of the graphs didn't do a lot to elucidate them; eventually, when Steve and Bucky were just staring at him blearily, he seemed to get it, clapped his hands, and said, "I think what I'm trying to say, _in layman's terms_ , is, I found several patterns. But I don't know exactly what all of them are, and I'm gonna be really honest and say that the margin of error on all of them is too big for me to be comfortable saying any of them really _is_ a pattern at all."

"So we're playing fast and loose with the idea of a pattern," Bucky said, massaging his temples.

"Very fast, very loose," Tony said. "Like -- what's the thing with the baskets and bouncing balls off walls?"

"Jai alai," Steve said. Bucky looked over at him and mouthed, _what?_ , turned away from the screen where Tony wouldn't see.

"Right," Tony said. "You know guys get killed by those balls? That's how fast they go. Anyway, it's only been like a day and a half, I'm not too worried." They all stared at him for a second, and then he said, "All right! Same time tomorrow?"

Bucky and Steve exchanged a terrified glance. "Why don't you call us when you think you have something within a better margin of error?" Natasha said dryly.

"Okay, okay, I get it," Tony said. "Have fun doing whatever it is that you do out there." The window with his face on it winked out of existence, and Natasha groaned, stretching, and then closed the laptop and pushed her chair decisively away from the table.

"I want to go swimming," she said. "I can't sit still for another second. Who's coming?"

They talked to Tony twice more that week, updates that didn't end up going anywhere -- there was something with adjacency to fault lines, and then something totally bizarre with locations connected to religious uprisings. Bucky felt like he was chasing his tail more than ever. In the off days when they didn't talk to Tony, he and Steve threw themselves into working on Those Fucking Stairs, as they'd privately named them, as a sort of respite. A way to keep himself from having to _think_ about it, all the time.

They slept in Saturday morning. They'd been up late the night before -- Steve had gotten caught up in painting, and then he'd sort of dropped what he'd been doing and come over on his knees and sucked Bucky's dick so thoroughly that Bucky, surprised, had come in about a minute flat. And then the whole evening had been derailed.

So there they were, lying in bed, still half-asleep, both of them naked as the day they were born. Steve had kicked most of the covers off during the night. The fan was blowing over Bucky's skin in such a way that he had the slightest crop of goosebumps, the coolness of the air tempered by Steve's cheek mashed against his shoulder and Steve's warm arm draped over his waist. He sighed and stayed exactly where he was. Steve's hand crept a little lower.

"You guys should get up," Natasha said loudly. Her footsteps sounded on the stairs, and then she pushed the door open, wrinkling her nose. "It smells like a locker room in here," she said. "Do you ever air this place out?"

"Yes," said Bucky sleepily, "Just not since last night." He didn't move.

"Tony's here," Natasha said. "You should get up."

"Tony's _what_ ," Steve said, sitting bolt upright, then immediately reaching for the edge of the sheet to cover himself.

"Tony is outside," Natasha repeated with exaggerated slowness. "I'm pretty sure James told Pepper she could visit whenever she wanted --" Bucky groaned. "So you should have been expecting this."

"I was expecting maybe like a little advance notice," Bucky said, sitting up too, running his hands through his hair. "Can you stall them? We really need to --" there was dried jizz on the underside of Steve's chin, and his appearance was that of somebody who had been very thoroughly fucked the night before, in more ways than one.

Natasha stared at Steve for a minute, as if she never thought she would be witnessing this moment, and now that she was, wasn't sure she had ever really wanted to see it at all. " _Bozhe moi,_ " she said. "You have five minutes."

They somehow managed to wedge themselves into the shower together enough to rinse off. Bucky's hair was a lost cause, and would probably be damp for the rest of the day. When Bucky looked out the bathroom window he could see Natasha with Tony, the Iron Man suit Tony had flown in on, and Pepper's white car, with her leaning on the hood. He jogged down the stairs and out into the yard, pulling his t-shirt over his head, and when Pepper saw him, she broke into a smile and immediately pushed off her car and came toward him.

He met her in the middle and pulled her into a hug, then held her at arms' length so he could look at her. He hadn't been able to picture her out here in the country, but she fit in just fine, wearing a tissue-thin, soft t-shirt and a pair of jean shorts. "Hi," he said, and then, turning toward Tony, "Hi."

"Wow," Tony said. "I don't know if anyone has ever been _more_ excited to see her and _less_ excited to see me."

"I just woke up," Bucky said, as if that was some kind of explanation. Steve exited the house too, barefoot, and walked over, shaking Tony's hand and then coming over to hug Pepper and give her a kiss on the cheek. "Why don't you come in the house?"

"That's what I've been asking Romanoff for the last ten minutes," Tony said. They all filed in, and Penny marched up to Tony and Pepper with her tail in the air saying _mee! mee! mee!_ excitedly, sniffing their ankles and headbutting their palms when they reached down to pet her.

"Coffee?" said Bucky, still with a slightly breathless feeling, like he was catching up,. "I'll put on a pot of coffee." He could hear them talking from the kitchen: Why'd you decide to come? Well, Pepper had been meaning to visit, and of course, Tony was _curious_.

"No spiders," Bucky said, bringing mugs into the living room, where they had all situated themselves. He passed them around, and then sat down next to Steve, who immediately put his arm around Bucky's shoulders. "We got rid of a lot of cobwebs when we moved in. The mosquitoes, we weren't quite as successful with, but that's mostly during the nighttime, so--"

"We can burn citronella candles," Steve said. "They won't bother you as long as you're not out wandering around in the woods at night."

"You'll have to show us around the property," Pepper said. "The views driving along the lake on the way up were very nice. And I like the house -- these French doors are beautiful. You've done such a lovely job restoring it."

"Bucky did all the floors," said Steve. "I just did the painting, mostly, I can't really take credit --"

"Jesus, listen to yourself, stop," Bucky said. "We did it together. Anyway, the stairs down to the beach are still a work in progress, and there's the barn we're going to have to deal with before winter if we want to keep anything in there. But we've done what we could."

"It looks great," Pepper said. "It looks just like the two of you."

After they'd finished their coffee, they went and walked around the property, and then down to the beach, while Tony did his apparent best to be completely unimpressed by it all. The stairs weren't finished, but they were good enough to hold weight now, although Tony gave them a skeptical look. Bucky could practically see the gears in his mind whirling and turning, probably coming up with some stairs that would be twice as stylish and half as difficult to build.

Natasha could evidently sense the same thing. As soon as Tony went to open his mouth, she said cheerfully, "I catch them skinnydipping down here a lot."

"Not a _lot_ ," said Steve.

"More than three times counts as a lot in this case," Natasha said. She kicked off her flip-flops and waded into the water, and after a moment, Pepper followed her.

"I'm guessing this wasn't really a social visit," Bucky said, folding his arms, looking briefly over at Tony.

"Well, partially," Tony said. "We could have just kept doing it over Skype, but you know, Pepper wanted to come up here, I was curious, I think I have some real news, so -- here we are."

"I should say," Bucky said, "if the two of you are planning on staying more than a day, I don't honestly know where the nicest hotel is around here, and the house is kind of at capacity. We only really have the one bedroom, and Natasha's been sleeping on the couch as it is."

Tony seemed personally offended by the idea that they'd be staying; his face made an expression briefly like he'd smelled something bad. "Pepper flew into Erie," he said. "She has some business thing, I think, I don't know -- I've got the suit. Really cuts down on travel time. It's handy."

"I bet," said Steve dryly, turning to head back to the house. Bucky looked out at Natasha and Pepper, who were laughing and splashing a little in the water, ankle deep, and then followed after him.

Once they were back inside, Tony pulled out his phone and hooked it up to Natasha's laptop. "I don't know if you remember," Tony said, "but _waaay_ back in the beginning of all of this, we were looking at spectrometer readings. So anyway, I got the idea to try and see if I could make anything out of that. I pulled up some readings from the incident sites we have recorded, and then I pulled up some readings of _you,_ right after you -- uh, got back, and --" he projected several individual graphs up into the room from his phone, and then overlayed them together on top of each other. "Voila."

"They're not the same," Steve said.

"No, they're not the _same,_ " Tony said, "but there are small parts of each of them that are very similar. Each of these places has at least two elements in common. I don't know _what_ those elements are, because they aren't on the periodic table, because I don't think they're technically from this universe, and when I ask Thor all he tells me are stories about trees and snakes and wolves having sex with women. But they're at --" he unmeshed the graphs again and started to scroll through them rapidly-- "every. Single. Site."

"So -- was it looking for them?" Steve said, chin in hand, pacing around the graphs. It was kind of funny; looking at them this way, you couldn't even tell which graph, out of all of them, was Bucky. He'd been reduced to a series of lines and numbers.

Both Tony and Steve looked at Bucky, and then toward the porch door, as Natasha and Pepper came back in. Natasha came over immediately and started looking through the graphs too, and Pepper met eyes with Bucky for a moment, and then went into the kitchen for more coffee. Bucky wished he could follow her, but soon he could feel Natasha's gaze on him too, and he knew they expected him to say _something_ , even if it was just 'I don't know.'

He ran a hand through his hair, and tried to pull the memories up. They were still all fragmented, and he didn't have a lot of sense of what order any of them had happened in, other than the context given by news reports. He did remember that sense of _looking_ , and the feeling that it wasn't a singular pursuit -- it was supposed to be for somebody else, something else -- "It was a scout," he said slowly. "I think it was a scout."

"Right," Tony said. "That makes sense. Like I said, these elements were all over you, too. I don't know how the hell it _works_ , I'm not an expert on xenobiology -- are there any experts on xenobiology? There must be. Anyway. I don't know how this thing works, but my best theory is that it vibrates on some kind of sympathetic level to these elements. Like that's how it eats, except it obviously doesn't eat, because it doesn't have a physical body. The other thing is that I got readings of these places from before and after it had been there, and the levels afterwards are significantly lower."

He did something with his hands again and pulled up another set of graphs. "So it's _depleting_ those resources, which makes a lot of sense if it's a scout. Wherever it's from, they must be running out of this stuff." He grinned, clapping his hands once. "Which _also_ gives me a clue about how to kill it. Because for every sympathetic resonance, there's a dissonant resonance too."

He was still grinning, when he'd finished speaking, like he expected some kind of audience reaction, but Bucky honestly didn't know how to react. None of the words Tony had said felt real.

"But it left," Natasha said. "Or at least we don't know where it is. And we don't know why it left, or if it's coming back." She looked over at Bucky. "Or how to get it to come back. Why it let him go in the first place."

"It didn't let me go," Bucky said.

Steve's head whipped around. "What?" he said.

"It didn't let me go," Bucky repeated. Suddenly the memory was so clear in his mind -- the wind whipping past his face, that dysphoric sense of instability, right before a long fall; he'd been trying to call it up for so long. Why didn't he want it now?

He thought Steve was asking him something else, but it was like hearing someone speaking to him from behind a closed glass door. His vision narrowed to a small circle of light surrounded by red and black, and then he passed out.

+++

He was in the air over the U.K. somewhere, in a helicopter, or a plane -- he wasn't sure. He couldn't turn his head and look around at his surroundings. All he could do was stare out the open door, looking down at the abstract blur of landscape and water below. From this height it looked like a diorama: The tiny trees like toothpicks, a road winding through the center of it.

He was leaning partially out the door. It was cold up this high, it always was, and the wind whipping past his face brought with it this vague sensation of pain. Not urgent pain, not enough that he needed to do something like pull himself back in, but the sensation of skin chapping, eyes watering. And he was looking for _something_ \-- no, it wasn't him that was looking, it was -- whatever else was in the plane with him.

He knew he was remembering this because he was thinking his way through it, whereas when it had actually happened, there had been very little of his own thought involved. Only what he could fit around the edges of the alien taking up most of the space in his brain. Only what could disguise itself as the autonomy needed to continue to function at an appropriate level, without causing distraction.

He couldn't jump. Jumping would have been pressing against control. Jumping would have been making a decision, and he wasn't the one making decisions in this situation. But he _knew_ \-- he was unlikely to survive a fall from this height without significant bodily harm. And it would be forced to leave him there, if he was hurt. It didn't have time to waste on a body that needed to heal.

It was too distracted, looking for whatever it needed, to parse the memories he was calling up, or maybe it just didn't understand the significance. Maybe it just thought he was afraid. And he was, but -- less afraid of falling than he was of this continuing. If he didn't do it now --

 _Bucky!_ Steve's voice, his face, fading away, and then his own voice, a wordless howl obscured by the wind and the air, as he fell, and then -- he didn't remember much. He didn't think he remembered the point of impact. It was likely he'd become unconscious before he hit ground anyway.

It wasn't -- it hadn't been so bad, they'd -- find him and fix him, and --

He leaned forward a little further. Just enough to shift his center of gravity. There was a second when he felt it realize what was happening, and it scrabbled at the edges of the door using his hands, but he'd already overbalanced too far. He felt the moment it let go of him, mid-air. He closed his eyes.

+++

"Bucky?" Steve was saying, when he opened them again. "Bucky?" His face, wide-eyed and pale, above Bucky. "Bucky, look at me. Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Bucky said. He put the heels of his hands into his eyes for a moment, and sat up, head pounding. Steve was kneeling on the floor next to him, and Natasha, Pepper, and Tony were all behind him, with similar expressions of shocked dismay.

"What happened?" Steve said.

"I fell," Bucky said. "I mean, I fell on purpose. I knew it -- it wouldn't want me if I was broken, so. An opportunity presented itself, and it was distracted, so I took it."

"It didn't let you go," Steve said.

"It didn't let me go," Bucky said. "So -- I -- maybe it would want me back."

"No," Steve said immediately. "Bucky, we're -- we're not doing that. There's no way we're taking that kind of risk --"

"Look who's talking," Bucky interrupted. He got up unsteadily and leaned on the kitchen table for a moment, trying to get his bearings around the throbbing in his head. He wasn't sure if he'd hit it on the way down, or if this was just a side-effect of remembering something he hadn't been meant to. He looked over at Tony and Natasha. "What do you think?"

They were both silent for a minute, and then Natasha said, "It kept you for significantly longer than it kept any of the other people it had under its control, and it's worth noting that you're the only one who _survived_. So I guess you could be right. If we give it the opportunity, it might want you back."

"It was still looking," Bucky said. "When that -- when I got away, it was still looking. I don't think it left. I just think it hasn't found anybody else it could use to wreak as much havoc as it did with me." He smiled, feeling the expression stretch the corners of his mouth, but there was no mirth behind it at all. "I have a pretty unique skillset."

"I'm gonna," said Tony. "Uh, I'll be right back." He took Pepper by the elbow and Bucky heard the squeaking of the hinges as the porch door opened and closed.

"You know that's not why it took you, right?" Natasha said quietly. Bucky looked down at his hands, his knuckles clenching against the wood of the table. "James, look at me."

He did, and she said, "It didn't take you because of how Hydra trained you."

"Why not?" Bucky said. "If it was looking for somebody that would be -- easy to control --"

"It didn't," Natasha said. "There was no way it had any knowledge of that, James. All it saw was that you were the strongest, so it took you. The rest was -- an accident."

"The strongest?" Bucky said. "What about Thor? What about _Steve_?"

"Asgardians are less susceptible than human beings to mind control, you know that," Natasha said. "And you're right, Steve might be stronger than you --"

"I'm not," said Steve, firmly. His hand touched Bucky's shoulder, the back of Bucky's neck.

"You have one major, easily visible advantage that Steve doesn't," Natasha said, pointing to Bucky's left arm. "So it took you, because you were the strongest, the fastest, the most durable, the best fighter. It didn't take you because it knew somebody had taken you and brainwashed you and punished you before. It didn't take you because it thought you would be _easy_ to control, James. In the end, it made maybe the biggest mistake it could have, because what it did was take somebody who had already escaped mind control once. And you did it again."

"It doesn't matter," Steve said. "We're not doing this. I'm not letting Bucky be used as bait, it's an insane idea --"

"Steve," Bucky said, and Steve shifted to the side, glancing at him. "It's not your decision."

Steve gave him this look, like, _don't do this to me, please,_ and Bucky reached up to touch his face. "If this was you," he said to Steve, "you'd do it in a heartbeat and you wouldn't give a fuck what I said. You can't let the entire world go to hell trying to protect me. I love you, but I won't let you."

He kissed Steve, and felt Steve's shoulders slump in defeat even as he leaned into it, his fingers winding into Bucky's hair. "Now," said Bucky. "We have to go find Tony, wherever he went off to, because none of this is going to work without him."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I've posted the OST for this story on [tumblr](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com/post/128739732139/a-stevebucky-fanmix-to-accompany-apophasis-rated) with a link to download, if you are so inclined.


	9. dark blue

9.

Natasha left when Tony and Pepper did, and so Steve and Bucky were by themselves in the house again. The tension didn't leave with her; it followed Bucky around as palpably as a human presence.

They tried to go back to normal, but it was always there, just around the corner -- the knowledge that something was coming. Building the stairs went even slower than it had before; Steve sort of drifted off, visibly lost in thought, and then often he would get up and leave and come back with his sketchbook instead. He'd sit, frowning, at the top of the bluff, drawing the same view, over and over. Bucky didn't know what to say to him, so he didn't say anything at all. He'd realized there might not be anything he _could_ say.

Tony and Bruce were working on the device they'd use to kill the alien. Between the two of them, they had a lot more than the necessary mechanical know-how, and the sort of craziness that Bucky had decided you needed in order to come up with something completely new. Before he'd left, Tony had even said, chipperly, "It won't be that hard," and Bucky supposed for him, it was true.

Sam came up that weekend. Sam was at once good at couching things in benign terms -- he just wanted to see the house, and Steve, and Bucky -- and completely transparent about the fact that he was worried. It was good for Steve, knowing that somebody else was worried.

"You know, it's interesting," Sam said, standing in the breakfast nook, looking out back. "Seeing what you guys picked out for yourself. I guess I never really thought about it before, but you didn't exactly pick any of the other places -- I never saw Steve's apartment in D.C., but the tower, that's all Tony. I mean, you furnished it, but the whole thing --"

"Kind of ostentatious," Bucky said. "Yeah." He'd never seen Steve's apartment in D.C. either, not really. He'd heard Steve describe it, though: Empty. Sterile. Somewhere Steve had been afraid to move himself into, or maybe more accurately somewhere he hadn't known how to make himself belong.

"It's a nice house," Sam said. "I like to see people fixing up these old places. So much new construction; they throw it up in six months, it's cheap, the love isn't there." He opened and closed the French doors leading to the living room. They creaked a little; Bucky'd have to look at oiling the hinges again later. "But this house, somebody built it thinking they'd live here for the rest of their life. That gives it something else, you know?"

"I'd say so," Steve said. "We bought it, after all."

"Must suck to have to leave again," Sam said.

Steve's shoulders rose and fell as he inhaled and exhaled. "Well, we'll come back," he said.

Sam looked over Steve's shoulder at Bucky, and Bucky shrugged, running a hand through his hair. "I needed it for a while," he said. "And I'll probably need it again. But I guess -- Natasha was right, you know. We do have a responsibility. And right now what I need is to make sure there aren't other people out there being destroyed by that thing that had me." He put his hand on the trim next to the door, rubbing his thumb in the carved grooves. "It'll still be here for us."

"It's a hell of a burden to bear," Sam said.

"It is," said Steve. "But people died to make me what I am, and I took the responsibility willingly, with my eyes open. Nobody else can do what we do; it's as simple as that."

"What about you?" Sam asked, smiling at Bucky. "Somebody died to make you what you are, too?"

"Sure," Bucky said. "I did."

+++

"It's a crazy plan," Sam said, later, after they'd finished dinner -- Bucky had gone into town and gotten some fish, and they'd grilled it up with some corn on the cob out in the cool evening air. "But I guess I just have to trust the two of you. I mean, I've been through some of his crazy plans before, and the craziest part is that they kinda tend to have a way of working."

"They work until they don't," Bucky said, glancing at Steve.

"Well, that's why I'm trusting that you'll be there to have the rest of it figured out," Sam said, grinning.

"That does seem to be the way it goes," Bucky said. Steve was uncharacteristically silent on the matter; he'd finished his food and was holding his plate listlessly, just looking out over the horizon. Bucky wondered why it was this way for him -- why Steve could accept himself as a lamb to the slaughter so willingly, but it was so profoundly different when it was Bucky. He reached over and rubbed his finger against the back of Steve's hand, and Steve looked at him, startled out of his reverie.

"This has been good for you guys," Sam said. "I can tell. You can tell just from looking at you. I'm glad you came out here." He looked out at the lake and laughed. "Hell, I'm glad _I_ came out here. And part of me is sorry you have to come back at all, but another part of me is -- proud, I guess. Proud that you'd both come back, because I don't know if I would. And thankful."

"You don't have to thank us, Sam," said Steve.

"I know, and I'm doing it anyway," Sam said. "Somebody should. And I want to say: I still have your back. I'm there for you all the way. And I'm happy to be there."

He leaned over and drew Steve into a hug, slapping Steve's shoulder, and then Bucky. He was tremendously gracious; Bucky didn't know how he could be so gracious, so genuinely good. Maybe that was his superpower -- seeing the face of war, the worst that humanity had to offer, and accepting it, loving it, smiling at it. Maybe that was the most impressive superpower of all.

+++

Sam left Sunday night; he had work on Monday, like most normal people, and it made Bucky miss his own job with a surprising intensity. He hadn't felt that way in a long time -- he'd missed Pepper, sure, but he hadn't specifically missed working. He'd hardly even had the energy to feel guilty about how little he was working, a feeling that had been a constant for most of his life.

There was something different about it now, too, that made it more painful. To have this body that worked perfectly, a body that didn't get sick, that should by all rights have woken up every morning refreshed and ready to go, and to still somehow be unable to get out of bed sometimes, unable to summon the strength or willpower or motivation, it was a kind of hell. He knew Steve had to feel the same way -- it was like betrayal, almost, the feeling. Like being betrayed by the darkest machinations of his own brain.

Maybe it was that he'd never had the luxury before, the choice. Maybe that was what made it, if not worse, infinitely more complicated. Before it had been pretty simple: He could hurt, his body could ache, back and feet and arms sore, but if he didn't get out of bed, if he didn't go to work, that'd be a day's pay missed, and sometimes-- often -- they just couldn't do without.

Anyway, it wasn't that complicated now. He did have a choice, but it was a choice where the right answer was pretty clear. And Steve knew that too, even if he didn't like it.

Steve wasn't sleeping. He tried to hide it from Bucky to the best of his ability, but Bucky had always been a light sleeper, and especially after years and years of rough awakenings, he came awake every time Steve got out of bed. At first he didn't follow Steve; maybe Steve just wanted privacy, and Bucky could understand that. They were in each other's heads so much it was sometimes hard to figure out which parts of him were concerned for himself, and which were concerned for Steve, or if they were different at all.

The fifth night it happened, he gave up on waiting. He got out of bed after a minute and wandered into the hallway, then to the study where he could see a desk light on. Steve was sitting there, surrounded by finished and half-finished paintings, flipping through his sketchbook.

"Hey," said Bucky.

Steve turned to look at him, his expression tired and drawn. Bucky didn't have to ask him what was wrong, or what he was worried about. He went over and budged Steve to the side so he could sit with him.

"I know what you want me to say," he said. Steve looked up, his eyebrows tilted, questioning. "I do," Bucky insisted. "You want me to promise I won't let somebody take me away again. And I want to promise it, I do, but you know I can't do that."

"I know," Steve said. His voice was thin, barely more than a breath, like it hurt him to say it.

"There's always going to be somebody," Bucky said, "who wants to hurt me, or you, or just -- people in general. If there's one constant in life, it's that. It's never going to end. It never was going to end, no matter how all of this happened. Even if you and me never existed in the first place, it would have kept happening."

Steve nodded. "And because of what we are -- who we are -- we're in the line of fire more often than most people," Bucky said. "And both of us have been through more than any one person deserves, or is fair, but -- this is it, you know? This is life."

Steve looked down at the page of his sketchbook, where he'd drawn Bucky sleeping with his hair spread out on the pillow and half over his face. The dark lines looked almost like tendrils, or fingers, seeping over the white page, over Bucky's closed eyes and open mouth. Steve saw that, Steve knew. "I can't promise I'll never get taken away again," Bucky said. When Steve met his eyes again, he continued: "But I've found my way back to you before. And that's all I can do: Promise to you that I'll come back. I'll do everything I can to come back."

Steve licked his lips, his chin trembling a little, and cast his eyes down. "I don't know if I can survive it," he said. "Losing you again."

Bucky leaned until his forehead was touching Steve's. He twined his fingers with Steve's, over the page of the sketchbook. "You can," he said. "You will, if it comes to it. Because that's what I'm asking you to do."

Eventually, Steve nodded, and then he put the sketchbook aside and put his arms around Bucky and just held him there for a long time. Bucky pulled Steve's head down against his shoulder and stroked his fingers through Steve's sun-bleached hair, and he committed this moment, like so many others, to memory, willing himself to be able to pull this up if he ever needed it. An anchor to bring him home.

After a while Steve's arms around him relaxed, and Bucky let go of him. They just looked at each other for a minute, and Bucky hoped to whatever doubtful powers of fate and will were out there, _not_ to leave Steve. Neither of them deserved the hurt of being ripped apart again, and even if the universe was -- not unfair, but profoundly indifferent -- if there was anything out there that could help, Bucky had to hope.

They went back to bed, where Penny was still asleep, curled up in the warm spot their bodies had left in the tangled sheets. She startled when Steve got back in bed, waking up all at once, then blinked sleepily at them, relaxing again, her paws stretched out in front of herself, claws kneading in the comforter. Bucky picked her up and moved her gently to the foot of the bed.

Steve was sitting up watching him, and Bucky leaned over and kissed him, when he was done. Steve's hands seized onto him again, his thumbs stroking over Bucky's cheekbones, and Bucky covered them with his own. Steve sometimes kissed like he would eat Bucky alive if he could, all covetous unabashed desire, and now was one of those times. And Bucky wanted it too; times like these it felt like he had been stupid to ever hide from it. He _had_ this, he could have this. He was allowed to, and more than that, he deserved it.

+++

"Ta- _da_ ," Tony said. The camera panned down to show a small device -- about the size of a cell phone -- sitting innocuously on the desk.

Steve leaned in a little closer, as if by doing so, he could somehow see it better. "That's it?" he said.

"Big things come in small packages sometimes, Cap," said Tony. "Wait, shouldn't you know that?" He picked the device up and rotated it, turning it over and over. It looked like nothing -- it looked just like a shiny, square black plastic box. That was the way it always seemed to be with this kind of stuff. Technology being what it was, it was often the most innocuous-looking devices that held the most significance.

"Does it work?" Bucky asked.

"Of course it works!" Tony said, indignantly. Bruce came into the frame from somewhere off-camera and leaned down so that Bucky and Steve could see his face, although since the camera kept trying to pan to follow him, it took about fifteen seconds of maneuvering before he was actually visible.

"We won't know for sure until it comes down to it," Bruce said. "But we tested it on some samples of the elements that were present at all of the sites where the being had been, and it successfully reduced them into their component materials, so as far as we know, yes."

"It's _going_ to work," Tony said. "There's no reason it wouldn't, the principles are completely sound --"

"Are you trying to convince us," said Bucky, "or yourself?"

Tony gave him a sour look and turned away.The camera followed him, shifting to a big lit-up globe dotted with bright white points of light in what Bucky could only assume were the locations of the largest deposits of the elements that the alien had been after. It was strange, how many of them seemed to correspond neatly with large settlements. Almost like the elements themselves were the byproducts of civilization, somehow. "Now," said Tony, "the trick is _finding_ this thing."

He rotated the globe, and Bucky followed the map of lights. "We're remotely monitoring the levels of the elements," Tony said. "Looking for any kind of significant change -- a drop, a spike, whatever. Whenever this thing decides to poke its head out of whatever hole it crawled into, we're ready."

Steve turned to glance at Bucky, and Bucky knew what he was thinking -- Tony's definition of 'ready' was uncomfortably close to the fabled Captain America definition of 'ready' in situations where you didn't have a choice to be anything but. They weren't really _ready_ at all, it was more that they were about to jump into the deep end of the pool and hope they remembered how to swim.

"Should we come back to New York?" said Steve, looking between Bucky and the screen. "For ease of convenience?"

"Eh," Tony said. "We have fast planes."

"Are you sure?" Steve said. "If this is the kind of thing where an hour either way can make or break it --"

"From everything we can tell, it's not," said Tony. "All the evidence we've got suggests that when our little buddy shows up somewhere, he settles in for at least a few days. All the better to suck the planet dry, I guess."

"So we wait," Steve said. His posture changed, only enough that you'd notice it if you really knew him, but Bucky saw it. Steve needed this to be over. He didn't know how much longer he could stand to wait. But at the same time, there was nothing they could do.

"Yeah, we wait," Tony said.

"Well, you know how to get ahold of us," Bucky said. "We'll be on call."

After they hung up, Steve went out to the porch and messed around with the painting he was working on, but even Bucky could tell he wasn't actually making any progress on it. He came back into the kitchen after an hour or so, and Bucky poured him a glass of wine and pushed it across the counter to him.

"I wish this did something," Steve said.

"I know," Bucky answered.

Steve sighed, tipping his head back. "What about Penny?" he asked, and the second that she heard her name, she came rattling in from the living room, putting her front paws up on Steve's leg and stretching out to her full length, trying to butt her head against his hand.

"We'll ask the neighbors to look in on her," Bucky said. "She'll be all right."

Steve drank his glass of wine in silence, rubbing Penny's head while she purred her loud, thrumming purr. Afterwards, he looked back and forth between Bucky and the painting, which was also of Bucky, turning to look over his shoulder as he waded into the water. "I want to finish that," he said. "Before --"

He cut himself off, but he meant _in case._ Bucky nodded. He went out into the porch and turned on the light and looked at the painting for a minute, and Steve came to stand behind him. Steve's hand landed on his back, his thumb rubbing at the seam where Bucky's left arm joined to his shoulder, and Bucky said, "Just tell me what you need me to do."

+++

The call, when it came, came in the middle of the night, five days later. It brought with it a kind of sick relief; the attempt at normalcy that Steve and Bucky had been pretending had only become less convincing since they'd last spoken to Tony.

The sound of Steve's phone ringing loudly woke them both. They were tangled up in bed together, naked. It had been an unexpectedly warm night, and they'd sort of started to stick together, the sheet and comforter pushed aside, both of them tacky with sweat.

"Hello?" Steve said, sitting up. Bucky ran a hand through his hair and looked over at him, his face illuminated by the cold blue glow of the phone's light. "Yes," Steve said. "Okay. We'll be ready."

He hung up, and put the phone aside, running a hand over his face. "Natasha will be here in an hour," he said. "It's in Oslo."

Bucky's heart beat double-time for a few seconds. He nodded, and then, mechanically, got out of bed and went to rinse off in the shower. When he came out, twisting his hair back into a knot, Steve was already dressed, all except the helmet, which he held on his knee. Seeing him in the uniform here was strangely discomfiting. It seemed so out-of-place. Bucky realized he hadn't even really thought about the uniform, the shield, any of it, since they'd been away from New York. They'd packed it in the back of the car and then put it away when they got to the house, and that had been it, for a while.

He got out his own tac gear and put it on, piece by piece. It was a ritual that was still, in its familiarity, somehow comforting. Just the ability to let his mind go blank, to follow the well-worn muscle memories --

The jet landed almost silently in the front yard, the only tree-free space on the property, forty-five minutes later. In the meantime Bucky had left a voicemail for their closest neighbors about Penny. Then he and Steve had stood on the porch looking out at the dark expanse of the property and the lake. At the light and sound of the jet's arrival, Steve met Bucky's eyes for a moment, and then they both turned and walked silently out.

The ramp came down. When they went up, Natasha was seated in the pilot's chair, wearing her tac gear too -- it had been a while since Bucky had seen her wearing it, enough so that it looked almost strange. She glanced over and nodded at them as they sat down and strapped in. Then she pulled the ramp up and fired the jet's repulsors, pushing it up above the treeline, until their house looked like a diorama in a museum, tiny and far-away.

Tony's -- Stark Industries' -- latest pet project was high-atmospheric travel, and of course the fleet of jets that Tony, the Avengers team, and the amorphous entity that had reformed itself from the remains of SHIELD used were all equipped with that tech. It cut travel time down by a factor of almost three-quarters, so that the trip to Oslo took an hour and a half rather than the eight and a half hours it would have normally. It was also, of course, extraordinarily expensive to build and maintain. Before Cottonwood, it had been one of the projects in Bucky's pipeline, reducing the cost and making the tech more publicly accessible. Now he didn't know if that project had been suspended, or if it had gone on without him.

He distracted himself with that while they were in the air. He had a certain far-away feeling, like he was watching the proceedings from just outside his own body, and he hated that he knew what that feeling meant by now. He hated that he'd felt it so many times before. But it was what it was: A coping mechanism. It was better than being paralyzed by panic and fear. It existed for a reason.

They landed somewhat outside the city, and Steve strapped on his helmet as Natasha walked down the ramp. He turned to Bucky, and took Bucky's hand. "I love you," he said. He said it with this tone that Bucky remembered him using to say a lot of other things, and none of them having to do with love: _You can't talk to her like that! What are you doing? Leave him alone. Show some respect!_

He said it like he was challenging something. It wasn't Bucky; maybe it was the world in general, or some god, or fate, if Steve even believed in such a thing. Like he was daring whatever forces were out there: Just try and take this away from me.

"I love you too," said Bucky.

They went down the ramp, and out into the morning air. It wasn't much different from Pennsylvania -- cloudier, and a little cooler, but not by much. They'd landed on a hill that overlooked the city and all its lights reflecting in the water, and as Bucky looked around, he realized that everyone was already here.

Tony was in the air, the red-and-gold of the Iron Man suit catching all the ambient light. He hovered near Thor, who was dressed in full battle regalia, proudly holding Mjolnir in a sure grip. Clint was leaning against the side of another jet, presumably the one they'd flown in on, and as he caught Bucky's eye, he grinned, and signed, _Hi, sheep fucker._

The ramp of the jet was down, and as Bucky watched, Sam, Bruce, and Sharon Carter all filed down the ramp too. For a minute Bucky almost felt like he needed to sit down. Sam came over; he was in full gear too, body armor and goggles. "I told you I'd be here," Sam said. "Why the hell do you look so surprised?"

Bucky shook his head, momentarily incapable of finding anything to say. Sharon walked up to them too and folded her arms. If not for her blonde hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, you could almost think she _was_ Peggy, the imperious way she was looking at Steve, the steel-boned set to her posture.

"Sharon," Steve said, sounding a little like he'd been punched.

"She would have wanted me to be here," Sharon said. "She would have been here herself if she could. I think I owe her that much. And you, too."

"Thank you," Bucky said, finally finding his voice. Natasha came up on his left and handed him an earpiece; he put it in, and glanced up at Tony. "So -- how are we doing this?"

"The signal we're getting is strongest in the northeast corner of the city," said Natasha. "Tony has been running scout missions without coming too close to the area in question, and we have it more or less pinpointed to an area of about a square mile."

"Okay," Bucky said. "Let's get down there."

+++

Clint landed the jet in the middle of an empty intersection; apparently the surrounding area had been evacuated as soon as Tony had noticed the change in the elements' levels. Tony and Sam were still outside, serving as eyes and ears for the rest of them. "Don't get too close," Bucky had warned them. There seemed to be a radius, a range of control, in order for the alien's thrall to take effect, and the last thing Bucky wanted was either of them falling prey to it.

"Wouldn't it be funny if we came all the way over and it wasn't even here?" Tony joked. He'd landed on the top of a building and was standing there, arms folded, looking down over the scene, while Sam circled the area. Bucky couldn't find it in himself to laugh -- especially when he stepped out of the jet, because all the hairs on his arm and the back of his neck stood up. There was some kind of tingle of strange energy in the air that he _recognized._ And somehow he knew -- it recognized _him_ , too.

"It's here," he said. Next to him, Steve glanced over, and then squared his shoulders.

"So what now?" said Natasha, coming up to stand abreast with them, looking between them and the empty street.

Bucky made his mind go quiet and focused on the feeling of discomfort that huddled deep in his stomach and hovered simultaneously just beneath his skin. "Follow me," he said. "Stay behind me. Stay -- a ways behind me."

He started walking, slowly, trying to follow that feeling to its source. He turned to look over his shoulder, and saw that the rest of the group -- except Bruce, who had stayed behind in the jet ready to activate the device -- had let him get some hundred feet away and then started to follow too, fanned out with Steve and Thor at the head. It was oddly like Cottonwood; that same eerie emptiness, all the buildings that had been hastily cleared, the deserted streets, the detritus of human life still there but without the people.

It was at once more and less strange than Cottonwood. Less, because the city itself showed less signs of its own inherent humanness; you couldn't just look inside and immediately see empty plates or deserted chairs. The buildings were sleeker, taller. And yet it was also far more bizarre to see a city with nobody in it; cities were almost creatures themselves, with teeming streets and full buildings. But this one just -- wasn't. Not now.

"Sir?" said JARVIS, in Bucky's earpiece, startling him a little. "Pardon me for interrupting, but I believe you may find it useful to know that the strongest concentration of the elements Mr. Stark has isolated is approximately fifteen hundred meters to your north-northwest, at an angle of two hundred and forty-five degrees."

Bucky mentally calculated and adjusted his course slightly. "Thank you," he said. He hadn't known JARVIS was here at all, although it made sense. He was usually wherever Tony was.

"Of course, sir," JARVIS said. "My pleasure."

He was silent after that; they all were, except for the sound of their footfalls. Bucky hadn't drawn a gun. He didn't know what good it would do, really. The further he walked, the less he felt like it would matter at all. The itch beneath his skin increased, like a gathering of static electricity in the air. He wondered if the rest of them could feel it, or if it was just him.

He somehow knew when he'd found the spot. His feet felt almost anchored, as if something was pulling him down. He held up a hand behind himself, signalling the team to stop. "Bucky?" said Steve, and he heard it at once in his earpiece and also echoing, more faintly, from the buildings, bouncing back and forth until it was no longer audible.

Now that he was this close, there was an odd feeling, like Steve's voice echoing, except it was in his head. And it wasn't Steve's voice -- it wasn't a voice at all. It wasn't even really emotion, because the thing responsible didn't feel emotion, in the human sense. It was -- it was --

\-- a body shambled out from the lobby of one of the buildings, hollow-eyed, bleeding from the nose. Nobody else had survived, Natasha had said, and it was burning through this one fast, too. Though there was no expression on the man's face, Bucky could somehow parse the creature's thoughts better, through the filter of a human brain. There was something like surprise. Something like a moment of fondness: He was stronger, after all. The shell of flesh he was tied to was less fragile than the rest of them. He had done, if not well, better than the rest.

But that moment passed quickly, and was overwhelmed instead by a sense of almost-disdain, except that the creature didn't feel disdain, or pity, or any of it. It was looking at them through the dim eyes of the body it occupied and thinking to itself, _why had they bothered_? The whole group of them was there again. All of these same people had accompanied him before, in Cottonwood, and they had been able to do nothing. They could do nothing now. So why -- why were they here? That question turned over and over, like a shard of rock being washed into a smooth, round pebble by the angry lashing of waves. It didn't understand. It couldn't understand.

Bucky felt the strangest thing. It was almost pity. This creature, whatever it was, wherever it had come from, could never understand friendship, or love, or anger, or sadness. Any of it. It didn't understand the sense of obligation that had drawn him here, or any of the rest of them. It would never be able to fathom what it was like to look at Steve asleep and think, _I would die a million times just to hold onto this moment._ It would never see the silver moon reflected in the lake and feel anything at all. All it did was search, and consume, and it might not even have the capacity to understand what it was destroying in its wake, or even that it was destroying anything at all.

It _reached_ for him. He felt it. It wanted him, in almost the same sense that Hydra had wanted him and had held onto him for all those years: To serve a purpose. The body it had been inhabiting slumped to the ground, lifeless or unconscious, possibly ruined either way.

He was more prepared, this time. He knew what it felt like, and he didn't lose consciousness right away. The walls of iron came down around him, closing him off from everything he'd just been thinking about. He couldn't have described i if he tried, because there would have been no way to couch the state of total emptiness, emotionlessness in human terms. Like he'd told Steve: Hydra had tried, and failed.

Someone's voice, calling the meaningless diminutive that he had been assigned. Steps forward. They would not shoot him. They wouldn't harm him, because he was one of them. Their misplaced loyalty would be their downfall --

His fists impacted flesh. Arms tried to hold him. Blood in the air, on his face, dripping on the ground. "Turn it on!" someone was shouting. "Turn it on, _turn it on_!"

A buzz, and then -- immense pain, terrible, like being submerged, like -- it didn't really know what pain was, it didn't know what it felt like to be destroyed, it couldn't even understand what was happening. His vision went white around the edges, red, and finally black, and the blackness crept in and in and in. Someone was screaming. He realized that it was him.

Everything went dark.

+++

Waking felt like swimming upwards in very deep water, reaching for the faint rays of light that filtered down to him. He coughed; his nose and mouth were sticky and thick with something hot and wet. He was being held. Someone's hand in his hair, someone's arm around him, pressing his face against -- he slitted open his eyes and saw only dark blue flecked with almost-black blood.

"Wake up," said someone. "Please, Bucky, wake up, just -- wake up, Bucky, please --"

He tried to make his hand cooperate, tried to clear some of the viscous liquid away from his face. His palm came away smeared with more blood, and then the hands on him were shifting him, pushing him just far enough away to get a good look at him. "Steve," he croaked.

Steve had a black eye and a bloody nose of his own. "Did I do that?" Bucky asked, reaching, smearing some combination of his blood and Steve's own across Steve's face.

"Kind of," Steve said. He swallowed, hard, and Bucky watched the tears that he couldn't hold back track their way through the blood and grime on his face.

"Is it dead?" Bucky said, shifting, his head lolling. Overhead, the haze had burned off and the sky was a clear, pale blue, framed by the tops of all the empty buildings around them.

"It's gone," Steve said. "It worked, we just -- I didn't know if it had -- taken you with it, I --"

Bucky became aware of how much blood was on Steve's uniform and the ground around them. It was almost black because there _was_ so much of it, all down Steve's front where he'd cradled Bucky, forming a tacky pool on the ground. "Abstract art," he said.

Steve gave a startled laugh, and then started to cry harder, pushing his head down against Bucky's shoulder so that nobody else would see. Bucky ran his hand over Steve's hair -- he'd taken his helmet off, the idiot. Probably had just ripped it off the second Bucky had gone down. "Hey," he said after a minute. "Hey, it's all right, it's okay, Steve, we're both still here."

"Yeah," Steve said, wiping his eyes with the back of one hand. "Do you think you can stand up? We should probably get you to a hospital. You might need a blood transfusion."

"Lucky me, I know somebody with the same blood type," said Bucky. He planted a hand on the ground and pushed himself upright a bit, and -- the world spun like he was on a merry-go-round. His head exploded with pain, a throbbing that started at his temples and expanded until it felt like his skull was being squeezed. "Wow," he said, "oh -- wow --"

"Sir, may I recommend that you avoid sudden or jarring movements to the head," said JARVIS politely. "My initial readings indicate that you have the equivalent of a concussion. An ordinary human being would not have survived the cranial trauma you have just experienced, and I believe the fact that you are conscious at the moment is almost entirely thanks to the genetic modification of the superserum."

Bucky said, "Okay," and tried to stay still, but it didn't do much good. The world wouldn't stop tilting and shifting. He locked his elbow. When Steve tried to take his weight again, his stomach lurched and did a backflip. He opened his mouth to warn Steve not to do that, and instead of words coming out, he threw up all over Steve's front.

They stared at each other for a moment. Bucky was thankful he hadn't had anything to eat in the past several hours. It was mostly just blood and water. "Jesus christ," he said, "I'm sorry, Steve, I meant to tell you not to try and move me, and then --"

"It's okay," Steve said, smiling ruefully, wiping his face. "I guess -- if you can't throw up on the person you're married to every now and again, who can you throw up on, really?"

Bucky heard the sound of Iron Man's repulsors firing nearby even as he thought he could probably just lay there for another hour or so until the world dancing and the cannon going off inside his head calmed down a little. "Wait a minute," said Tony's voice in his earpiece, indignant, loud. "Wait -- wait a _minute._ Did you just say -- you're _married_?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. :) Find me on [tumblr.](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com)


	10. plenty

10.

The first thing Bucky did when they got back to New York City was get a haircut. Well, not the _first_ thing, because they got back at three in the morning. Technically the first thing he did was take the elevator down with Steve and walk through the apartment with all the lights off trying not to jar his still-aching head. But the next day, he'd woken up feeling better, the roaring behind his eyes dulled to a low-grade steady thrum, and decided it was finally time to do it.

He'd done this before, too; Steve had suggested very early on in Bucky’s recovery that he get a haircut, that it might help him remember, and he'd dismissed it. He'd been holding onto it, and he'd kept holding on until he felt okay letting go. Sometimes you had to hold onto something until you understood it, before you severed it from yourself.

But he was ready now. Whatever he'd been clutching so tightly, for whatever indefinable reasons, it was time to let it go. And besides that, there was just _too much_ hair there for him to deal with anymore. It got tangled up at the back of his neck in unmanageable knots no matter what he tried to do with it, and he was getting tired of having it end up everywhere -- shower drains, pillows, in his food.

To her credit, his stylist didn't say anything about the state of it; she just did what he asked, and he left the salon feeling lighter and a little more ready to face the inevitable cameras and shouting reporters.

The second thing he did was see Pepper. He'd wanted to talk to her ever since she and Tony had come up to Pennsylvania, and hadn't really had any time alone with her since Natasha and Tony had both been so intent upon talking shop. He called her office and was pleasantly surprised and a little embarrassed when she cleared her schedule for two hours to have lunch with him. He didn't know if he'd ever stop being surprised that Pepper wanted to be his friend.

They met at a French Mediterranean restaurant with big glass windows that looked down on the street and the other tall buildings. It was all white and chrome and crystal, an aesthetic Bucky would probably forever associate with Pepper. She was wearing grey; he saw her the second she came through the door.

She was on her phone but immediately hung it up and came over to him, grabbing him by both arms for a few seconds to look at him and then hugging him tight. "I'm so glad you're okay," she said into his neck and shoulder. "I was so worried."

He cupped the back of her head, careful not to dislodge her ponytail, and held onto her. "I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay. I'm sorry to make you worry."

"At this point, worrying about you guys is kind of second nature," Pepper said, pulling away and smoothing down her jacket, walking with him to their table. "I've been worrying about Tony for practically my entire life anyway, so it's almost nice to have other people to spread it out."

"I know what you mean," said Bucky, thinking about Steve. He pulled out her chair for her, and she folded into it. "Thank you," he added, sitting down too, glancing around and feeling a little underdressed. "Thank you for making time for me. I hope you didn't cancel anything important."

Pepper stared at him for a second and then laughed. "No. Nothing important. Please don't worry about it." She tilted her head, looking at him, and then picked up the drink list. "You got your hair cut. I like it."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "It was time. Thank you." He just wanted water; the aftereffects of the concussion were still lingering, and he didn't want to risk anything that might upset his stomach. Pepper was still watching him when he looked up again, and he licked his lips. "I didn't get to talk to you when you came up to see us in Pennsylvania," he said. "I wanted to see you, I -- I wanted you to know that I did _want_ to talk to you, but I just. I couldn't, not with Tony and Nat so focused on the mission, you know."

"Oh, James," said Pepper. "It's okay. I know. We both have all our own stuff going on, and for a while that kind of coincided, and now it doesn't anymore. I wasn't hurt, I knew what was happening. I knew you had to do what you had to do. Unlike Tony, you don't exactly seem like the kind of person who goes looking for trouble. I knew it was something you had to deal with."

Bucky nodded. "I just -- I care about you. And --" he sighed. "I don't know how long we're going to be staying here this time. I started to really _miss_ work, while I was out there, but I know Steve wants to go back, and I do too. I don't think we're finished yet, you know what I mean?"

Pepper echoed his nod with a smaller movement, her ponytail swaying. "I know you said there'd always be a place in the company for me," Bucky said. "But I don't want to be holding things back by not being here. I don't want to be letting people down, I --" he laughed. "You know me."

"I do know you," Pepper said. She smiled slightly. "I know what it's like. I'll tell you what: We have plenty of people who work as remote contractors, and I have absolutely no problem setting you up to work remotely too, if that's what you want to do. But I want to make sure you're not doing it just because you feel some kind of sense of obligation."

"No, I --" Bucky laughed again. "I really miss it, I do. I think this is the first time -- second, I guess -- in my life that I've ever been not really _working_ for this long. Sooner or later it's going to start to drive me crazy."

"Then we can make it happen," said Pepper. Their server came over and Pepper ordered her drink, and then when the server left again, just looked across the table at Bucky for a while. Her gaze went soft. Maybe sad.

"What is it?" Bucky said, as gently as he could manage.

Pepper shook her head, snapping out of her reverie. A little half-smile took up residence on her face. "I was scared for you," she said. "I really thought something terrible might happen. In fact, I had kind of convinced myself, and so now, seeing you sitting there, it feels kind of surreal."

"It feels kind of surreal to me, too," said Bucky. He kept thinking about it during the meal, how caught up he'd been in his own mind. Trapped, almost. And he had assumed that Pepper had just gone on without him, that he'd been some minor puzzle piece missing near the edge. He had been wrong.

When they got up to leave, he caught her elbow by the front door, before she could walk out. She turned to look at him, and when she did, he took both of her hands. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you, you -- you always make me feel better about myself somehow, I want you to know that. And I know I said it before, but I'm sorry for making you worry."

"You keep apologizing to me," Pepper said, smiling at him, squeezing his hands. "But I'm not mad at you, James. I never was, only worried. I'm just glad you're feeling better. And I'm happy to see you."

+++

When he got back to the apartment, Steve wasn't there. In fact, Steve didn't show up until a couple of hours later, by which time Bucky had called the neighbors in Pennsylvania to check on Penny and was now on the couch, half-asleep and checking e-mails. "Hey," he said when Steve came in the door, and sat up to find Steve looking over curiously. "Where'd you go?"

"You remember Chioma?" Steve said, tossing his keys into the key dish and unzipping his jacket. "Chioma Udechukwu? The curator?"

"Of course I remember her," said Bucky. "You went to have a meeting with her?"

"Yeah," Steve said. He poured himself a glass of water and then came over to the couch. Bucky folded up his legs so Steve would have room to sit, and he did. "I figured I have a pretty large body of work now, you know, so I sent her an e-mail to see if she was interested in having another show, and she wanted to meet to talk about it."

"Uh huh?" Bucky said, putting his chin in his hand. "So what's the verdict?" He couldn't imagine Chioma would say no, because Steve's last show had been a pretty big success -- as far as Bucky knew anything about art shows, which was still not a lot.

"I think we're looking at December again," Steve said with a smile. "I told her not to move anything around for me, but she wouldn't give me a straight answer about whether she was or not. So anyway, probably the second week of December."

"That'll be nice," Bucky said. "I mean, if it's the ones you did up in Pennsylvania, those are all pretty summery, people will need a little taste of that in December."

Steve laughed. "That's a good way of thinking about it," he said. "I never would have thought about it that way."

"Well, that's why you gotta keep me around," Bucky said, leaning back against the couch and studying Steve. It wasn't exactly that he was _surprised_ that Steve had gone to see Chioma, but it was something that hadn't even really entered the realm of possibility in his mind. He was glad. He knew how rarely Steve got to show off that side of himself.

Steve rubbed his thumb against the corner of his mouth for a moment. "You don't mind, do you?" he asked.

"Don't mind what?" Bucky asked.

"Some of them are fairly private, I guess," Steve said, and Bucky realized immediately what he meant. You could see the darkness kind of creeping through in most of them, one way or another. Steve hadn't shied away from it in his artwork, as hard as it had been for both of them to deal with it otherwise. And -- he was naked in a lot of them, or close to it, but that part didn't really matter much to him anymore anyway.

Bucky reached over and ran his hand over Steve's hair. "I don't mind," he said. "As long as you don't. That's as much you as it is me in those paintings, you know."

"I painted them, so I hope I know," Steve said. He leaned to kiss Bucky, and Bucky felt the warm metal of his wedding ring as he cupped Bucky's face, the texture of it different than his skin.

He took Steve's hand and looked at it when Steve pulled back, rubbing his thumb along the band. Steve looked down at his hand and then back up at Bucky again. "I felt like wearing it," he said. "Not that I made a decision or I want to tell anyone or anything, I just felt like wearing it."

Bucky nodded. "We're coming up on a year, you know," he said, although he didn't know if a year counted when he'd been gone for almost half of it.

"I know," Steve said. "Tony wants to throw us a party. I don't think he's going to take no for an answer."

Bucky grinned. "That's okay," he said. "I haven't been to a party in a while. I think I'm about ready for a good one." He snorted. "It's probably better than sitting here on the couch answering e-mails and trying not to fall asleep. I think I just typed a sentence that starts out normal and then turns into complete gibberish halfway through."

Steve leaned over to look at Bucky's screen, where true to his word he had been writing, _"Not sure how long dtrfe amf i eill ve im rgw cfty,"_ and laughed. "I don't know, these are science people, right?" Steve asked. "So maybe they could decode it."

Bucky groaned and closed his laptop. "That was a bad joke," he said. "We can't stay here too long, Tony's starting to rub off on you. I can't take much more of this."

Steve pretended to be mortally offended at being compared to Tony, and Bucky had to put his laptop well out of flying elbows' reach to wrestle with Steve. And then wrestling turned into kissing, with Steve's hand up his shirt as he pinned Bucky to the couch, and that was a lot more interesting than answering e-mails after all.

+++

Natasha texted him one morning to ask him if he wanted to go to the ballet that night. It surprised him a little; she had enacted a sort of radio silence since Oslo which Bucky had assumed was either punishment for him or, more simply and more likely, her way of protecting herself. In a way he was relieved to get the message, and he texted her back right away, _what time?_

She was wearing a green dress that glittered like a cup full of poison in the lights of the parking garage. The ballet was a contemporary piece, and the dancers flung each other around stage sort of like they were fighting. It was almost uncomfortably familiar to Bucky. And if it was familiar to him, it had to be familiar to her, too.

Afterwards, she said, "I'm starving. You want to get something to eat?" and they walked over to a Korean place nearby where Natasha sat by the window eating a kimchi sandwich, incongruous in her lovely dress with her hair loose and spilling over her pale shoulders. She should have brought a jacket, Bucky thought. He took his off and put it over her, and she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

"You know, I kind of thought we were going to have to have a conversation," said Bucky, turning his glass of water around and around on the table.

Natasha watched him as she chewed and swallowed a bite. "About what?" she said.

Bucky sighed. "Yeah, that's what I figured," he said. "I'm fine not having the conversation, but only if it's actually true there's not something we need to talk about."

"How'd you like the performance?" Natasha said.

Bucky glanced at her incredulously. "It was interesting," he said. "I think you knew exactly what it was going to be like before you brought me there."

"I'm familiar with the choreographer's work," said Natasha.

Bucky shook his head. He waited until she'd finished her food and they'd paid to say anything else. The air had started to get a chill to it at night, and she held his jacket around herself as they stood on the corner. He didn't know if they were waiting for a car, or hailing a taxi, or what. "I don't know what you want from me," he said.

She smiled, just the corner of her mouth twitching up for a moment. "I don't know either," she said.

There was an ocean of silence there for a few minutes, even though it wasn't silent at all -- the cars rushing past, honking, bike bells dinging, people laughing and talking as they walked. All the normal sounds of the city. The silence was in all the parts of the past that Bucky couldn't remember and Natasha could, maybe, or maybe the parts that neither of them could remember but couldn't quite forget either. The absence of something could sometimes be enough evidence to haunt you with the knowledge that it had existed.

He wished he could give it back to her, whatever she was looking for. But she didn't know it well enough to even really know what it was, and neither did he. And the thing was that he knew somehow that he could just let this happen, let the gap between them stretch until it widened into an impassable crevasse. Maybe part of Natasha wanted that. _He_ didn't want it, though, and he knew that whatever part of her wanted it was the sad, scared part of her she had forced to become ice and stone a long time ago. It was a feeling he was familiar with.

She had turned to look at him, her eyebrow raised. He grabbed her by the chin and kissed her swiftly on the mouth; when he pulled away, she looked not surprised, but angry, with two spots of red high in her cheeks. "Listen," he said. "Just because you care about me and I care about you, it doesn't mean you own me. I know you're used to getting what you want, one way or another, but the fact that you know things about me that Steve doesn't, and that maybe I don't either -- it doesn't mean you get to dangle that over my head like some kind of obligation."

She didn't say anything, stubbornly, just like Steve. "I was a shitty friend," he said. "I can acknowledge that, I'm not in denial of that. I already said I'm sorry, and I'll say it again if you want. But either you forgive me or you don't, okay? We're not going to play this game."

She just stood there stonily silent and absolutely still for a minute, and then she shook herself and ran her hand through her hair. "All right," she said. The corner of her mouth quirked up just a little. "Now I remember why I don't let people get under my skin like this."

"Come _on_ ," Bucky said, calling her bluff. "As if you had a choice. As if any of us do."

She looked at him steadily a moment longer, and then tossed her hair over her shoulder and stepped out into the street to hail a cab. "Come on yourself," she said, opening the door when one pulled to the curb. "Let's get home."

They didn't say anything on the ride back, though she leaned against him, and eventually he put his arm around her. She was staying on one of the guest floors of the tower, and as the elevator doors slid silently open to let her out, she turned to look at him and smiled, a knife-thin smile, but a genuine one nonetheless.

"Goodnight, _lisichka,_ " he said.

" _Sladkikh snov_ ," she replied, " _odinokiy volk_."

+++

So, this party that Tony was throwing. It was ostensibly some kind of "Autumnal Equinox Celebration," which caused enough controversy on its own among conservative Christians who saw it as some kind of pagan pageant. Unofficially, since the news had spread to the rest of the Avengers and people they worked with regularly -- Coulson, Maria Hill, Sharon Carter -- it was a celebration of Bucky and Steve's first wedding anniversary.

There was a lot of press about it in the days leading up to the celebration. Tony hadn't really thrown one of his big charity galas in a while; he had mostly stuck to attending other people's, which had been news in itself. And now that he _was_ throwing a party again, it had to be, of course, of ridiculous proportions.

"I feel like this is going to be a lot more trouble than it's worth," Steve said, trying and failing for about the fifteenth time to tie his bow tie.

Bucky slapped his hands out of the way and started to do it himself. "You say that but you always end up having fun at these things," he said. "Besides, you get to see me in a tux, that's not every day."

"All right, that's true," Steve said. "I guess -- I do have fun, at the ones you're at. Before you came back, it was all just really awkward. I mean, you know how I am."

"What, trying to drown yourself in liquor and mostly avoid eye contact so nobody would talk to you?" Bucky said. "Come on, Steve, you were never _that_ bad. You just thought you were. Anyway you have me here as social lubricant, so it's all a moot point."

"Yeah," said Steve. "As long as _you're_ feeling all right."

Bucky would have been offended, but he knew what Steve meant; he'd woken up at three in the morning the night before drenched in a cold sweat and shaking uncontrollably. He couldn't remember what the nightmare had been. All he knew was that it chased at the edges of his consciousness enough that it was at least two more hours before he got back to sleep, two hours where Steve had mostly been awake too, trying to talk him through it. "I'm all right," he said. Sadly, it was kind of par for the course at this point. "I want to go and have fun and not think about that bullshit for a while, okay?"

"Okay," Steve said. Bucky smoothed his hands down the front of Steve's shirt and stepped back to look at him, studying the symmetry of the bow tie. "How do I look?" Steve asked, maybe a little cocky.

"Good enough to have all the rest of those poor suckers fooled," Bucky said, grinning when Steve's expression shaded to slightly offended, leaning up to kiss him. "Me," he said, "you don't have to worry about fooling."

+++

There was a red carpet and everything, and Bucky and Steve paused obligingly for pictures which would be all over the internet and the papers tomorrow. Neither of them had officially spoken to the press in a while, and the more legitimate news reporters clamored for a soundbite; Bucky had very little doubt in his mind that Christine Everhart was probably already inside, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. He tightened his arm around Steve's waist and said through his teeth, "Don't say anything to them."

Steve raised an eyebrow, turning his head slightly so he could speak more into Bucky's ear. "I wasn't going to," he said. Flashes went off, blindingly. Bucky didn't blame them; despite his teasing, Steve did look good.

"Sure you weren't," Bucky said, shifting his hand, goosing Steve. "I know you, remember?" He pulled away with a little wave to the photographers and started to hustle his way inside, felt Steve following him. It was all crystal chandeliers and champagne bottles in there. They had told Tony not to make it too obvious, and maybe that wasn't _exactly_ a wedding cake, but it looked pretty goddamn bridal to Bucky.

"There they are!" Tony shouted, from the balcony, and almost everyone in the room turned to look at them, almost in unison like something out of a bad romantic comedy. "The men of the hour!"

Beside Bucky, Steve went very stiff, and Bucky lifted his metal hand and drew a line across his throat with his finger. Tony came jogging down the big marble staircase, over to them, and thankfully after a minute or so everybody went back to whatever they'd been doing before. "I still can't believe you didn't tell me you were getting married," Tony said. "Why would you deprive yourselves, and me, of the opportunity to throw the party of a century?"

"That was kind of the point, Tony," Steve said. "We told three people."

"Including my _girlfriend_ , who is a traitor and somehow managed to keep that secret from me for almost an entire year," Tony said.

"Pepper is a woman of hidden depths," Bucky said. "Anyway, now you're throwing a party, so what's the problem?"

"It could have been _so_ much bigger and better," Tony said. "You think you've seen parties, but you have no idea, trust me." He gestured with his martini glass to the room, which -- looking at it, there had to be two hundred people here at least, and Bucky had no idea who most of them even were. "You think this is big? This is small potatoes, boys. Now that I've mostly stopped drinking and I don't do any of the other stuff anymore, this and Iron Man are basically my only two outlets to expressing my prodigious talents. Denying me the chance is just cruel."

"You are amazingly like your father sometimes," Steve said.

"He's right," Bucky agreed.

"Only sometimes, I hope," Tony said, making a face. "Okay, don't let me keep you. Go, enjoy the party, everything is free. But I swear, the two of you are _going_ to cut that cake if I have to make Thor and Hulk each hold one of your arms to do it."

"I can agree to that," said Bucky. "You just come find us when you want to do it, we'll cooperate."

"All right," Tony said, "As long as 'come find us' doesn't mean you're gonna be in the bathroom doing the hoochie-coochie with each other, or whatever you guys called it in the forties." He saluted them with his martini glass, bowed slightly, and dissolved back into the crowd.

"What the fuck is the hoochie-coochie," said Bucky.

"Uh," said Steve.

"Never mind," Bucky said. "You know, one time I told Natasha that Tony wasn't an alien, but I'm starting to suspect I was wrong. Let's get a drink."

+++

He was in the middle of demonstrating the cha cha slide to Steve and a small crowd of onlookers when he felt Natasha's hand on his shoulder. He couldn't say exactly how he knew it was her, but he did, and when he turned, she was wearing a deep-burgundy dress, almost black, that looked like blood spilled out on the floor, her hair swept up elegantly.

"Hi!" he said, and leaned in to kiss her cheek. She was soft and powdery and smelled like sandalwood and amber, with an undertone of something sharper. "I wasn't sure if you'd be here. I heard a rumor you were out of town."

"Are you kidding?" she said, pressing a fresh Old Fashioned into his hand, reaching past him to hand Steve a gin and tonic. "I wouldn't miss this party for the world. Tony hasn't thrown a bash like this in at least a year." She smiled at him, touching his cheek, and said a little more quietly, "Happy anniversary."

"Thank you," Bucky said. He knocked back about half of the drink in one go so he wouldn't spill it. "Can you dance in that thing? Because you were the one that taught me this dance, it's only appropriate you do it with me."

"I wouldn't wear a dress I couldn't dance in," Natasha said, lifting her skirt slightly. "But I think the song's about to end."

"Oh, I think we can fix that," Bucky said, waving his arm to get the DJ's attention, then twirling his finger in a circle to indicate 'play it again.' Just as the song came to an end, it restarted again, and this time there were a lot more people than just Bucky dancing. Even Steve gave it a shot.

They danced to a couple more songs after that, and then Steve saw a whole group of people that they knew coming in, including a harried-looking Pepper making up the rear, so they went back over to the bar area to say hello. "I thought I wasn't going to make it!" Pepper said, coming over to throw her arms around Bucky. "I barely had time to change, my meeting ran _so_ late, I don't even know about my hair right now --" she stopped herself, and smiled. "Happy anniversary."

'Thank you," Bucky said. "You look beautiful, sweetheart. Don't worry about it. I'm glad you could make it." He glanced around. "Tony's up on the balcony somewhere; he's going to make us cut the cake."

He let go of Pepper so he could give Sam a hug, and then received a hearty slap on the back from Thor which penetrated to such a depth that it felt more like a Swedish massage than a greeting. Clint hung back a little, talking to Natasha and Bruce, but when he saw Bucky, he winked and cheerfully signed, "Sheep fucker!"

"Gang's all here," Bucky said to Steve, once he'd taken a minute to say hi to them, and to Jane Foster, who was standing half-behind Thor, looking anxiously past him at the bar.

"Yes they are," Steve agreed. "I guess we should think about doing this whole cake thing pretty soon." He started to turn, looking between Tony holding court on the balcony and the big white monstrosity of a cake, and Bucky could see him start to decide to walk over there. He put his hand on Steve's arm before Steve had a chance, and turned Steve back toward himself.

"What is it?" said Steve.

"Thank you," Bucky said. "For -- saying yes, for agreeing to all of this. For coming after me when I didn't know myself and sticking with me through all of this shit. And happy anniversary."

Steve looked at him for a moment, his expression clearly focused inward, and then the concentration dissolved into a smile. "You're thanking me, but I feel like I should be thanking you," he said. "You're the one who came with me first. You're the one who did all the work; you're the one who found your way back, I feel like I was just waiting. It feels like that's what I was doing for all that time, in between, because I think the only time I was really living was when I had you around. Everything else is just -- static. Static and ice."

Bucky stared at Steve, and then he blew out a long, slow breath, feeling a little verklempt. "I'm getting sentimental in my old age," he said. running his hand over his face. "Let's go see about this fucking cake."

There turned out to be some kind of white cream ganache inside the cake that had half-melted into a viscous liquid in the heat of the room. The second Steve and Bucky, each of them with one hand on the knife, cut into the cake, it came squirting -- and then oozing -- out, and Bucky couldn't restrain an undignified cackle. It got on his jacket, and then Steve picked up a piece of cake and pushed the entire thing into Bucky's face, and that was the picture the next morning at the top of Page Six of the New York Times: Bucky with ganache on his jacket and cake all over his face, laughing wildly, Steve next to him still holding the knife, in hysterics.

+++

They went and visited Peggy's grave, not long after. She'd insisted on being buried in Brooklyn, and it was a lovely cemetery, well-maintained, with big maple trees and flowers on nearly every grave. It was strange watching Steve walk up to the grave, because he changed the second he saw it, going stiff in that way he always had when he didn't want to show defeat or pain. Bucky had learned to see through it a long time ago.

He went up beside Steve and put his hand on Steve's shoulder and just looked down at her name on the headstone. It was simple. She wouldn't have wanted something ostentatious, and it made sense. Just a name and a pair of dates.

He regretted that he hadn't gotten to say a proper goodbye to her, but then, when had any of them gotten to say a proper goodbye to anybody? And more than that, he didn't know what he would have said -- he still didn't understand what his and Peggy's relationship to each other had been, and didn't know if he ever would.

"I miss her," Steve said. "Even when she was old, you know. I miss her."

"Of course you do," Bucky said, and then, "I'm sorry, Steve. I'm sorry the two of you didn't get more time together."

Steve looked at him out of the corner of his eye and smiled a little. "It's all right," he said. "We had what we had, and it was good. None of us can change the past."

He paused, and then, after a moment, he added, "And anyway, sometimes I do think about what would have happened if things had gone differently, and -- I don't know. I just don't know. I don't know how any of us would have done it."

Bucky nodded, looking down at his shoes, and then at the grave again. He'd done plenty of thinking about it too, and the best conclusion he could come to was that he would have let her have Steve, even if it had driven him crazy, which it was likely it would have. If there was ever anybody who had deserved to take Steve away from him -- and that was it, that was what he had been afraid of -- it was Peggy Carter.

"I can tell what you're thinking," Steve said, after some silence had elapsed, "and I wish you wouldn't. I loved you for a long time before I knew how to admit it to myself, you know. I wouldn't change that, ever." He sighed, reaching out and resting his closed fist on top of the headstone, tapping it gently a couple of times. "I just miss her."

Bucky could picture Peggy very clearly in his mind just then, shaking her head at them, one eyebrow raised and her arms folded. "Me too," he said. "Me too." He squeezed Steve's shoulder, and then reached out to rest his own hand on top of Steve's on the headstone. "And I'm still kinda mad that you didn't tell me she'd died, by the way."

Steve gave a rueful laugh and shook his head. "I was planning to," he said. "I was just waiting for the right time; I don't know why I thought there would be a right time, somehow. It was stupid. You deserved better. She deserved better."

"There you go again, trying to be _better_ all the time," Bucky said. He thought of Peggy's lovely face, the look in her eyes when she saw Steve come into a room. She had been something else. "Like I said before: We always loved you for exactly who you are. We both did."

+++

It was almost October by the time they made it back out to Pennsylvania. It felt different leaving this time, and the best that Bucky could figure was that it was because this time they weren't running away. There was no trailer, none of their furniture, just a few more things they'd brought from their apartment in the tower to make the house in Pennsylvania a little more suited for long-term living.

If you had asked Bucky before, he would never have said he was anything but a city mouse. And he loved New York, he did. He was beyond loving it, really; it was in his bones, his blood, every molecule of him. It was a part of him as inextricably as Steve was a part of him, and if seventy years of Hydra trying to scrub Steve out of him and failing was anything to go by, that was a pretty unbreakable bond.

But it was -- it was nice to be alone with Steve. Away from everything else. He'd spent so many years surrounded by people, performing, in one way or another, and he could admit that he wasn't the same now as he had been then. Once upon a time he had felt buoyed by the energy of a crowd. Once upon a time that feeling had _given_ him something, left him feeling like a lit-up lightbulb, full of electricity and glow. And sometimes it still did, but now he felt the darkness afterward so much more keenly.

He still had people, even if he'd never understand exactly why they stuck by him. What he'd lost in the joy of belonging in a crowd full of laughing strangers, he'd found tenfold in this strange group of people. These people, all of them chipped, battered, and bruised, who wouldn't leave him even if he pushed them away as hard as he could.

And then there was Steve. It wasn't fair to say that Steve hadn't changed, because he had: They all had, and to say that they'd changed for better or for worse wouldn't make sense. Change wasn't inherently good, and it wasn't bad. It was just change. But his place in Bucky's heart had never changed. He'd always been there, taking up more room than he could really be said to deserve in any objective, rational way. A fixed point. The North Star.

It got stuffy in the truck, so they rolled the windows down. The sound of the air rushing by stole half of Steve's voice as he sang along to "Stairway to Heaven," so Bucky joined in with him, watching Steve's fingers drumming at the steering wheel, laughing when Steve dropped the high notes and left Bucky singing by himself.

He thought back to February. He wouldn't have been able to imagine himself feeling this way then. There had been a time when he had believed he'd never be able to build back up the bottom that had dropped out of his world. He realized that it hadn't been the first time, either. Life had a way of pulling the rug out from underneath him: Steve's mother. The conscription letter. Hydra. The train. Hydra again. And a thousand smaller instances where he hadn't been able to see a way out, but had climbed out of it anyway.

He was still scared. He didn't know if he'd ever be able to let go of the fear entirely. Just like Steve, it had a part of him and it seemed unlikely to ever let go. He had to take it as it came, though, the good with the bad. Just like everybody else. And it was these moments that made it worth it: Singing in the car with Steve, Pepper's beaming face as she toasted them the night of their wedding. The arc of Natasha's arm in the air, Sam's laugh. Steve's surprised face as he dropped his ice cream cone on the sidewalk and said, "What? I mean -- yes!" or the way he'd sometimes run his hand over his hair right after he got out of the shower, sluicing water down his face and neck.

They turned onto the gravel driveway. The trees had started to change. The maples were going first, and some of the ground cover, turning to brilliant red. Then the yellows and oranges would come in. It would be beautiful in the fall, all the color against the eggshell blue of the sky and the lake. It would probably be beautiful in the winter, too; he could almost picture the silence of the lot behind the house, blanketed in a thick, unmarked white cover of snow. And then spring would come, and it would be beautiful then too, all the wildflowers and the trees blooming.

Steve parked the truck next to the house. It didn't look any different than it had when they'd left, and as soon as he stepped out of the car, Bucky heard Penny meowing from inside. She threw herself at him the second he opened the front door -- it had only been about a month, but she was a lot bigger than the last time he'd seen her -- and he picked her up, letting her rub her face against his cheek and listening to her loud, rattling purr.

Steve followed behind him, budging past Bucky so he could set down one of their two boxes of stuff on the kitchen table. Bucky went after him, and watched him stand and look at it all like he was taking it in for the first time, hands on his hips. Maybe he was taking it in for the first time, sort of. Bucky was, too: This time he knew he was allowed to stay here if he wanted. That this could be home. His and Steve's.

Well, for a while, anyway. They'd be back in New York the first week of December to get the paintings there, and work out getting Steve's show installed, and Bucky imagined they'd stay through Christmas, at least. Maybe New Year's. Maybe they'd let Tony talk them into going to Times Square and freezing their nuts off. It could be fun.

He set Penny on the floor, where she twined around his legs for a minute and then ran over quick as lightning to sniff Steve's shoes and rub against him too. Steve bent down to pet her, and then stayed there after she ran off again, crouched with his hands on his knees.

"Penny for your thoughts," said Bucky.

Steve shook himself, turned to look at Bucky, and smiled. "I was just thinking, what are we gonna do when we run out of stuff to fix up? Aren't we almost finished?"

Bucky went over to the breakfast nook and looked out at the lake, and after a second Steve came to stand next to him, leaning against him slightly and resting his chin on Bucky's shoulder. Bucky shifted his gaze, peering out at the barn; that'd need, at the very least, a new roof before the first snowfall, or else it was liable to collapse on itself. And there were still acres of land they hadn't even touched. They could plant crops, if they wanted. Maybe -- he laughed to himself. Maybe they could grow grapes; the soil up here was good for that. Maybe they could try their hands at making wine. He didn't even really know what was out in the expanse of soft rolling hills and forest.

Steve was looking at him quizzically. Bucky smiled. "No," he said. "There's still plenty to do."

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's done! I apologize for how long it took me to write this chapter; I decided very wisely to take on the challenge of Inktober, which meant I spent most of the month of October painting Bucky every day and very little of it writing. If you want, you can see the results over at [my tumblr.](http://dorkbait.tumblr.com) So many Buckies. Buckys?
> 
> Thank you as always to everyone who has read, commented, kudos'd, or bookmarked this story. I started writing this when I was in a pretty rough place, and going back and reading it has been slightly uncomfortably like looking in a mirror at times. So I appreciate the support, I really do. Thank you all for making me feel less like I am screaming into the void. Until next time!


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